Lourdes

“Ok, his snack is in the outside pocket and he has clean Pull-Ups inside in case he has an accident. You sure you want to watch him? I could probably take him with me. It’s going to be mostly paperwork with just a few minutes of an interview.”

Rachel rolls her eyes and reaches for Toby, who squeals with delight. He loves coming here—cookies, puppies, a swing set in the back yard, kids and toys galore. What two-year-old wouldn’t?

“Hush. Go get your money for college. We’re going to have fun, aren’t we, Toby?” She slips her hand under his shirt to tickle his soft brown belly. He almost wiggles out of her arms trying to escape before she sets him on his feet.

“Ok, gotta go make lunch for the heathens. Good luck.” My sister kisses me on the cheek and shoves me out the door.

I’m so lucky she runs an in-home daycare. She’s always saying, “What’s one more kid? Bring him over,” but Toby’s spent more time with Rachel lately than me, and I’m his mother.

I have a dream for us, though, and that dream is going to secure Toby’s future someday, so this is just as much for him as it is for me. We grew up in a middle class home in LA. Mom is a court reporter and Dad’s a cop. Our parents wanted more for us than they had, as all good parents do. Mom was always preaching about higher education, and Dad taught us to stay out of trouble on the dangerous streets of LA. Now that I look back, I realize some of the things he said and did were to keep us from falling into the wrong crowd.

He was always saying things like just because you girls are black doesn’t mean you have to be poor and work hard, dream big. I think that last one was a Nike slogan, but he adopted it as our family mantra. I often wondered if they gave us untraditional names to keep us from being pigeonholed into specific ethnic groups because we have such a diverse family. My mother’s mom is Hispanic. I’m named after her, and Dad’s dad was Irish. That’s how we have Kennedy as a last name. They wanted us to have every opportunity available so that we could have the things they didn’t and couldn’t provide us with. They didn’t need to worry, though. The most important thing that we needed was love, and they gave us a plethora of that.

I take a few steps backward on the big wrap-around porch and look up at my sister’s house. This is what I want for Toby and me someday. I’m not relying on anybody to give it to me either. I’m going to do it on my own. I turn and trudge down the steps to my car with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I have wanted to be a lawyer since well . . . since always, but I didn’t plan on getting pregnant and having a baby my senior year of high school.

Of all the people in my class, I was the last person people would have expected to get knocked up. I was a straight A student and worked part-time in a local law office. I was on the debate team, I was a cheerleader for the football team, and I even dated the quarterback of our football team for three years without losing my virginity. The summer before my senior year, Terrell and I had waited long enough. The one time I was careless, the only time I listened to my heart instead of my head, I was blessed with both a miracle and a roadblock in the form of an eight-pound bouncing baby boy. But I’ve come a long way since then.

Today, I’m meeting with a group that offers assistance to underrepresented students. Right now, they are my only hope of staying at Berkeley. I have all my fingers and toes crossed that I’ll be one of five students awarded their scholarship.

I made it through my freshman year working, but my classes are getting harder. Next year, it will be impossible for me to work full-time, mother full-time and go to school full-time. I can’t afford to quit my job to spend more time studying, but I have to keep my GPA at 3.7 to stay in the pre-law program. What I need is a miracle.

* * *

“Thank you for your time, Ms. Kennedy. You’ll be contacted soon if you’re chosen to receive the scholarship.”

I shake the little mousey woman’s hand and return to my car with an ominous feeling in my chest. That didn’t go well. It wasn’t anything I said or did in particular, but I could tell they didn’t think the mother of a two-year-old was worthy of their money.

It’s not over till it’s over, of course, but I’ve already uncrossed my fingers and my toes. Sometimes you just know when you’re defeated. It’s temporary, though. I’ll never give up on becoming a lawyer. If it takes me thirty years, I’ll take the bar. For now, I’m going to take my son home, feed him dinner, give him a bath, tuck him into bed, and cry myself to sleep . . . but just for now.

“Hey, Sis. how’d it—” Rachel heard the squeaky screen door open and turned from folding laundry on the couch to greet me. I must have DEFEATED stamped on my forehead, though, because she doesn’t even finish her sentence.

“That bad?” she asks.

“Yeah, they were a bunch of anti-kid librarians looking for a poor ass 4.0 GPA nerd, not a trendy mother of one with a 3.8 GPA and a bunch of bills.”

“But they didn’t say no, right? I mean, you still have a chance at the scholarship?”

Rachel is an optimist. She’s upbeat, cheerful, and faith-filled, and she loves the shit out of kids, but this is a lost cause, and I know it.

“Technically, yes. Realistically, no. I can’t see it happening. I’ll have to figure out a different way. I’m probably going to have to take a year off and save up, but I’m not quitting. I’m going to be a lawyer.”

“I know you are, kiddo. I’ve never had a doubt.”

I plop down on the comfy tan couch next to Rachel and look around for Toby.

“He’s out back with Blake and Ivy on the swings. I didn’t get a chance to finish this today,” she says, digging into the clean laundry basket and pulling out one of Ivy’s sweet little dresses covered in roses. She holds it out in front of her to shake out the wrinkles.

Blake is my brother-in-law and also a medical malpractice lawyer. Ivy is their youngest daughter, who just happens to be the same age as Toby. We were pregnant together, and it was weird. Blake and Rachel had Kira three years before Ivy and Toby came along. It was helpful having an experienced older sister pregnant at the same time, but I always felt like the black sheep of the family for unexpectedly getting pregnant at a young age. Rachel was the golden girl who did everything in the proper order. She went to college, married Blake, and had Kira two years later, then she got pregnant with Ivy when I was a senior in high school. She lives a charmed life in her pretty house in the golden state with her loving, attentive husband and her two beautiful daughters. I’m jealous, but not so much of Rachel as of Blake.

I couldn’t stand to stay home all day every day with a crew of babies like Rachel, but I’ve dreamt of being a lawyer like Blake forever. I used to make a little courthouse in my room and take turns playing the judge, the prosecutor, and the defendant. I would shuffle briefs and argue Baby Alive’s case in front of the court all morning and then switch to being the judge, pounding the gavel all afternoon and yelling, ‘Case dismissed!’ or ‘I find you in contempt!” My parents thought I was a little off, and so did Rachel, for that matter, but they supported me just the same.

I love the independence and responsibility that come with being a lawyer. I love learning, reading and arguing, and I figured, what better way to make a living? I want to help people, and after what happened to Toby’s daddy, I want to make a difference in the world.

I was eight months pregnant when I walked across the stage and received my high school diploma. I walked right behind Terrell, because our last names both began with K. He was Kelley. I was Kennedy. That was the last time I ever saw him alive. He was hit and killed by a drunk driver that night while leaving a restaurant with his parents. We were supposed to meet later at a friend’s graduation party, and he never showed up.

The driver was never convicted of murder. It was a nationally known disgrace. He had three times the legal limit of alcohol in his system and he was high on prescription pills, but he was rich. His father hired an attorney who used ‘affluenza’ as a defense. They got a psychiatrist to claim he was profoundly dysfunctional because of his parents’ lack of discipline. Amazingly, he was only sentenced to rehab and ten years of alcohol- and drug-free probation.

I always knew I was going to be a lawyer, but if there was even an inkling of a doubt, it was erased the day I walked out of that courthouse, holding my baby and mourning the loss of his father without justice. My faith in our legal system was shaken to the core, but instead of complaining about it, I decided to dig my heels in and get to work learning how to change it.