Chapter Twenty-Seven
Christmas Eve was his and Christmas Day was mine, and Roz got that in a phone call that took her under six minutes because Calloway had stopped enjoying this file.
He picked them up at two on the twenty-fourth.
I stood on the landing in my coat and watched the truck go out of the gravel lot and turn onto Bardwell, and then I went inside and wrapped four presents on the living room floor with the television on for the noise.
Seven hours. I had done the empty weekends by then, three of them, and I had a system: a job for the first two hours, a person for the middle, and a job for the last two. Nothing in between. The middle is where it gets you.
The middle of Christmas Eve, it turned out, is not a thing you can put a person into. Everybody has somewhere to be.
So I did the closet.
Ruby’s list had eleven items on it and I could afford three.
I got her a set of markers with a case that zips, the kind with sixty of them, which cost nineteen dollars at the craft store on Route 8 and which she had been talking about since Halloween.
I got her a book about a girl who has a horse.
And I got her a hat with ears on it because it was four dollars.
Jonah had not given me a list.
I had asked twice. The first time he said he didn’t need anything and the second time he said the same thing in a different order, and I understood that pushing a third time was going to turn into a conversation neither of us wanted at Christmas.
So on the twenty-second I asked him one more question, differently.
“Not a present. Is there anything you want that isn’t a thing.”
He thought about it for long enough that I went back to the dishes.
“Can we put the frame in the living room.”
I turned around.
“The one from the county?”
“Yeah.” He was doing something with his fork. “It’s over my bed and nobody goes in there except us.”
“Where do you want it.”
“By the door,” he said. “So people see it.”
I bought a hook at the hardware store for a dollar sixty and I put it up on Christmas Eve while they were at his mother’s, and it’s eight and a half by eleven and it’s the first thing anybody sees when they come up my stairs, and it has been there ever since.
They came back at nine ten.
Ruby had a shopping bag with a doll in it that cost more than my week of groceries and a Christmas card from Vivian with a check in it for a hundred dollars.
Jonah had a card too.
He put the whole thing in his backpack without opening it and I found it in there in the middle of January when I was cleaning out a math folder, still sealed, and I put it back exactly where it was and I have never mentioned it to him.
Christmas morning we opened four presents in about eleven minutes and then Priya’s family came at one and there were nine people in a two-bedroom over a garage.
Priya’s mother-in-law brought a card table.
Mr. Dorsey came up from downstairs with a tin of the hard candy nobody eats and stayed four hours and told Jonah about being on a ship in 1969.
It was, without any competition at all, the best Christmas of my adult life, and it cost me sixty-eight dollars.
My insurance ended at 12:01 a.m. on the first of January.
I had known the date since the twenty-fourth of October and I had watched it come the way you watch a car in your mirror.
The children stayed on his plan. That is the one thing that man did correctly the entire winter and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Jonah’s asthma inhaler and Ruby’s well-child visit and the dentist twice a year all went on running exactly the way they had, and if either of them had ever needed anything serious it would have been covered.
It was only me who came off.
I applied for Medicaid on the twenty-eighth of December at a computer at the library, because the Hollis Center pays seventeen dollars an hour and a household of three at twenty-two hundred and ten dollars a month is under the line in Ohio by a comfortable margin.
The application is forty minutes and it wants everything.
There is a section about other coverage in the household.
It asks whether any member of the household is covered by an employer plan, and I sat at a library computer between a man printing a resume and a teenager on a phone and typed my husband’s name and his employer and his group number into a state form, and clicked a radio button that said the children were covered and I was not.
Approved January nineteenth. Retroactive to the first, which I did not know they did.
Nineteen days uncovered.
Nothing happened in the nineteen days. That’s how it usually goes and that’s the part that makes it hard to explain to people.
Nothing happened. I did not get hit by a car.
I simply spent nineteen days doing arithmetic every time I got in the CR-V and every time I went down my outside stairs in the dark, which ice up on the second-to-bottom one.
I got the flu the second week of January and worked all five days of it.
Not because I’m tough. Because a shift I don’t work is money I don’t have, and because an absence is a line on a document, and because I had spent three months learning that everything about me was now a line on a document.
Priya took one look at me on Wednesday and said, “You’re gray.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re gray, and you’re going to hand that to a four-year-old with a trach.”
Which was correct, and which is why I spent Thursday and Friday in the back doing intake calls with the door shut and a box of tissues and did not touch a child.
Bernie never said anything about it. On Monday there was a can of soup on the front desk with my name on a sticky note in her handwriting.
The support order came through on the ninth.
Roz got the number I did not expect. Sixteen hundred and twenty a month in child support, and a medical provision, and a hundred and forty a month toward my attorney fees, and all of it retroactive to the filing on the twenty-fourth of October.
I sat on the edge of my bathtub and did the math three times because I could not make it be true.
Then I read the second page and found out how long it takes.
There is a thing called income withholding, which is where it comes out of his check automatically, and setting it up is a process that goes through the state and takes four to eight weeks, and until it is set up the obligation exists on paper and the money does not exist anywhere.
“He can pay it directly in the meantime,” Roz said. “He won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t required and because a man like that does not hand a woman money he isn’t compelled to hand her.
” Papers. “Don’t budget it. It’ll show up in February or March, it’ll come with the arrears in one lump, and it will feel like winning the lottery, and until then you’re going to keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing. ”
So I kept doing exactly what I’d been doing.
Rent on the first, two hundred to Iva on the fifth, three hundred to Roz on the fifteenth, thirty-one dollars to the power company on a payment plan, gas, groceries, and forty dollars a week that I had started putting in an envelope in a coffee can under the sink because Anne Whitcomb’s sliding scale for Jonah came out to forty dollars a session and I was not going to be late on it.
Fourteen hundred and seventy-three dollars a month against more than seventeen hundred in rent, debt payments, utilities, and therapy before gas or groceries, and anybody with a pencil can see that does not close.
Here is how it closed, because I am not going to sit here and let it look like I was clever.
Bernie moved me to thirty hours the first week of December.
She did not announce it. She wrote the number on the schedule board and let me find it, and when I came into her office about it she said the intake calls had gotten out of hand and went back to what she was doing.
That put it at twenty-two hundred and ten.
Iva Prosser let January’s two hundred go to February and then behaved as though she had forgotten she had.
And there is a food pantry in the basement of the Methodist church on Third that opens Tuesdays and Fridays.
I went on Tuesdays because it is less crowded, and I am not going to be delicate about that.
There were eleven or twelve other people in that line most weeks and every single one of them had walked through a door to get there.
It was not fine and I am not going to tell you it was. There was one week in there where the three of us ate rice and eggs for three days running and Ruby thought it was a theme.
But nobody took anything from me between the first of November and the first of February.
That is the entire accounting. Nobody took one single thing.
The envelope came on the twenty-third of January.
Ohio Speech and Hearing Professionals Board. Standard business envelope, window, the kind of thing you leave on the counter for two days.
I opened it standing up in my kitchen with my coat still on.
Reinstatement approved. License status: active.
I read it about six times, and then I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and my coat still on, and I did not cry then either, which by that point I had stopped expecting of myself.
Fourteen months of not opening emails. Nineteen months lapsed when I walked into Bernie’s office.
Five hundred and eighty dollars I did not have, twenty hours of continuing education done at a motel desk and then a folding table, and a woman in an office in Columbus who has never met me clicking a box.
I got up and I went to work and I put it on Bernie’s desk.
She read it and put it down and looked at the ceiling for a second.
“Monday,” she said.
“Monday what?”
“Monday you’re back on the schedule as a clinician.” She was already pulling the shoebox out from under the printer. “Thirty-one an hour, eighteen hours to start, and I’ll build you up as fast as the board lets me.
“And you’re taking this one first.”
She handed me a slip.
I looked at it.
Toby Nance. 5 yrs. Ten words. Mom crying on the phone. 8/14.