I was washing dishes that belonged to other people when the caseworker told me the kids would be split up on Friday.
Kayla’s kitchen still smelled like ham and lilies. Somebody had brought a tray of deviled eggs in a dish with a floral lid, and somebody else had brought a casserole in a pan with masking tape on the bottom that said RETURN TO PAT B. Kayla had been thirty-four. Her heart, they said. Nobody had known there was anything wrong with it.
The caseworker’s name was Renee. She had a folder she kept closing and opening again.
“Sharon’s taking the baby,” she said. “Ruby goes to Fort Myers. Theo and Callie will go to separate homes for now. Nobody in the county has room for three.”
Through the doorway I could see Theo on the arm of the couch, nine years old, holding his little sister’s shoes in his lap like somebody might take those too.
I’m Audra. I was married to Kayla’s brother for eleven years. We’ve been divorced for three. On paper, I am nothing to those children at all.
“I’ll take them,” I said.
Nineteen Days
Renee didn’t say no. She said something more careful, which was worse.
She explained that the county considers people who aren’t blood relatives, but that it takes a home study, and that the home has to be approved, and that a one-bedroom apartment above a flower shop is not a home for three kids, and that I’d been divorced out of that family since before Ruby was born.
“You’re asking me to hand you a two-year-old and a six-year-old and a nine-year-old who just lost their mother,” she said. “I’d need more than a good heart, Audra. I’d need a plan.”
“How long do I have?”
“The placement order’s dated the ninth.”
Nineteen days.
I found Doug in the driveway, smoking, which he’d quit twice while we were married. My ex-husband is not a cruel man. He’s a man who gets very busy when something hurts.
“You’re not doing this,” he said.
“Somebody has to.”
“Audra, you make eighteen-something an hour at a grocery store deli.” He said it gently, which was the part that stung. “I can’t even walk in that house. How are you going to feed them?”
“Are you taking them?”
He looked at the end of his cigarette for a long time.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Then I’m not asking your permission.”
I drove home and sat in the parking lot behind the flower shop and did the math on the back of a deli receipt, because that’s the paper I always have. Rent on the empty two-bedroom downstairs was two hundred more than I paid. Car seats. A second dresser. Daycare for Ruby three days a week, which was a number so big I wrote it twice to make sure I’d read it right.
I had eleven hundred dollars in savings and a 1998 camper up on blocks behind my cousin’s barn that I’d spent a year and most of my Sundays fixing up. New floor. New cushions in a fabric I picked out for an hour at the fabric store like it was a wedding dress. The plan was the Gulf. The plan was to be fifty-three years old and sitting outside that camper in a folding chair with nobody needing anything from me.
I listed it Tuesday night and sold it Thursday for forty-two hundred dollars to a retired man from Yorktown who said his wife was going to cry when she saw it.
So did I, a little, driving home. Then I stopped at the store for boxes.
The Math on a Deli Receipt
Nita works the counter with me. She’s fifty-eight, her feet hurt, and she has told me more than once that she has raised all the children she intends to raise.
She looked at my list on the third day and took the pen out of my hand.
“You’ve got Ruby’s daycare on Mondays and you’re on schedule Mondays,” she said. “You’re going to get fired in about two weeks and then none of this matters.”
“I’ll switch with Dale.”
“Dale has court on Mondays. Give it here.” She wrote her own name in the Monday box, then handed the pen back. “Don’t make a thing out of it. I’m not doing bedtimes.”
The landlord let me into the downstairs unit and stood there while I measured the second bedroom with a tape measure, saying nothing, and then told me he’d hold it for two weeks without a deposit. My sister sent a check I didn’t ask for. A woman from Kayla’s old job dropped off a bin of clothes on my steps with a note that just said from the sitter, Tuesdays.
I said thank you to all of them and I meant it. I also stayed up until two in the morning building the bunk beds myself so no one could say I’d needed help doing it.
That was the part I got wrong, and I didn’t know it yet.
The Text I Never Answered
Theo wouldn’t talk to me.
I took them all to the park on a supervised visit, and Callie climbed on me like I was playground equipment, and Ruby fell asleep on my shoulder in eleven minutes flat. Theo sat on the bench with a spiral notebook on his knees and answered every question I asked with one word.
Finally he said, “Are you going to send us back?”
“No.”
“That’s what people say.”
He opened the notebook and turned it around so I could see. It was a schedule, written in pencil in a nine-year-old’s careful printing. Callie bus 7:40. Ruby medicine before bed, pink one. Mom work Wed Thu Fri nights, don’t call unless real emergency. Pages of it. Phone numbers. A list of what to say if the landlord came by.
“I kept it so nobody would forget stuff,” he said.
On the inside cover, in his mother’s handwriting, there was a list of people to call. My name was on it. My old number, crossed out. My new number written underneath in different ink, which meant Kayla had updated it at some point after the divorce, after I’d stopped coming around.
I sat there on a park bench and scrolled back two years in my phone until I found her.
Hey — are you still doing Sunday dinners? The kids ask about you.
And under it, from me: Miss you guys!!
That was all. That was the whole thing. I had typed two words and an exclamation point I didn’t mean, because staying close to Kayla meant staying close to Doug, and I’d decided that was too hard for me. She had asked once. I hadn’t answered. And she’d still written my number in a notebook where her son could find it.
“Your mom asked me to come around once,” I told Theo. “A while back. I didn’t.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to tell you I’m a great person. I’m telling you I’m not going to do that twice.”
He took the notebook back and held it against his chest, and after a minute he leaned over just enough that his shoulder touched my arm, and we sat there like that until the visit was over.
What Sharon Could Give
The meeting was in a county office with a table too big for six people.
Renee had my file. Sharon — Kayla and Doug’s mother, seventy-one, sharp as a tack and honest to the point of pain — had her purse in her lap and her mind made up. Doug came and sat against the wall instead of at the table, which told you everything about Doug.
Sharon said she’d take Ruby. She said it plainly. “I’m seventy-one and my knees are shot. I can do one. I cannot do three, and I’m not going to promise something I’ll fail at.”
Renee turned to me. “Tell me about your support.”
I opened my binder. I had the lease. I had the daycare paperwork. I had a schedule in six colors.
And somewhere in the middle of reading it out loud I heard how it sounded, which was a woman proving she needed nobody. That’s how I’d been living for three years. That’s how I’d been handling everything since Doug moved out — alone, and on time, and exhausted.
I stopped talking.
“That’s what I’ve got on paper,” I said. “Here’s what’s true. Nita takes Mondays because she offered and I need it. My sister sent money. I don’t have a plan for Christmas break and I don’t have a plan for when one of them gets the flu.” I looked at Sharon. “Theo has a notebook with your phone number in it. He’s the one who’s been keeping all this together, and he’s nine, and I would like him to be able to stop.”
Sharon set her purse on the floor.
“I can’t do three,” she said again. But slower.
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I could do Tuesdays,” she said. “I’m here until March. I could do Tuesdays and I could do supper.” She pressed her thumb into the table. “And July. They can come to me in July.”
From the wall, Doug said, “I’ll cover the daycare.”
Everybody looked at him. He was looking at the floor.
“I can’t be in that house,” he said. “I can’t do—” He stopped. “I can do the daycare. Every month. Put it in the file.”
Renee wrote for a while. Then she closed her folder and said she’d recommend a provisional placement, pending the home study, with conditions and a review at ninety days.
Nobody clapped. Sharon picked her purse back up. Doug went outside.
The List on the Fridge
I’d like to tell you it was beautiful after that. It was not.
Ruby cried at two in the morning for eight nights straight and couldn’t tell me why. Callie called me Mom once by accident and then wouldn’t speak for a whole afternoon, ashamed. Theo checked the locks. Twice a night, every night, for a month, I’d hear him in the hall.
The home study passed in October. Guardianship is still working its way through, slower than anybody told me it would be. Money is tight in a way that I feel in my stomach on the fifteenth of every month.
But Sharon comes Tuesdays and brings a pork roast and complains about it. Nita has done bedtime twice now, and lied about it both times. Doug has never once come inside, and the daycare check has never once been late, and I’ve stopped needing those two facts to make sense together.
Last week I found Theo’s notebook in the recycling, which I took to mean something.
There’s a list on my refrigerator now, in my handwriting, held up by a magnet from a pizza place. It says THEO across the top. Under it there are two things.
1. Shoes by the door.
2. That’s it.
He hasn’t said anything about it. But he hasn’t taken it down, either.
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Secret Life Of Mom
Love and Peace
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are invented.