She takes her kids to the park to preoccupy them with swing sets and jungle gyms. Tells them, when they ask, “you ate already” like they’re tiny Alzhemiers patients who can be fooled with reassuring words and misdirection. She tried not to go on food stamps, but pride gives way easy to a child’s aching stomach. She remembers the jabs she heard as a child about government cheese and welfare babies. But those words didn’t apply to her then—young, well dressed and fed— unaware of what it meant to be a scavenger.
She gets enough on her little plastic card to last them the most of the month, but those last few days feel pretty thin. She works. She manages to keep the lights on and the rent paid most months but sometimes they spend a few days in the dark. She tells her kids that they’re on adventure—camping in the living room. Candles and ghost stories. Cold beans from the can.
A few times she’s had to barter with the landlord—cleaning his house, mowing the lawn. Once when the whole of the rent went to fixing up her busted Buick, she gave in a bit more than she wanted. She would have cried about it, but there was no need to waste the tears.
When she did cry, she knew how to hide it, how to turn her face and wipe her eyes; how to smile like the mothers who come through her checkout line buying fresh fruit and good meat and whole wheat bread for their children’s lunch sacks.
The same women look at her when she drops her kids off at school. The look says she doesn’t care because her children are dressed in Goodwill clothing and the slices of cheese in their white bread sandwiches came wrapped in plastic. She hates the looks from those mothers accusing her, assuming she doesn’t love her kids as much as they do, when perhaps, perhaps, she knows how to love them more. Knows how desperate love can be when there is a chance it could be taken away.
She’s a good mother. She takes them to the library where they can pick whatever they want. She can’t afford to own the pages, but she can give them the words. Stories of adventure and entrigue, castles and fairies and happly ever after. It breaks her heart to know that one day the world will show them all that these fairytales are not.
When her hours are cut at work and her car has left them stranded and in need of more repair than it’s worth, she does the best she can, but eventually the power goes out and does not come back on. She reads them books by candlelight and tells them wild stories of peril and triumph. Finally the landlord has had his fill and posts the little pink slip on her door. She takes them from shelter to shelter. But scared and tired of staying awake at night, holding onto them as they sleep, she finally takes them to DSS like turning in a liter of kittens. Perhaps some nice family might take them. Buy them new clothes, tuck them in—warm and safe into a bed dressed with new sheets and a downy comforter. They sit outside the government building with her arms wrapped around them, the air in her chest is as ripped up and cold as the January air, cutting her throat on the way in and out.
“What are doing, Mommy,” the older one asks and sound of the little voice cracks what’s left of her.
In the end, she can’t do it. Better that she cut out her heart for that nice rich family to fry up in fancy meal. Instead, she pulls their secondhand coats tight around them and walks away from the government building. Two blocks down, she pulls open the heavy wooden doors of the church she knew as a child, walks them all the way to the toes of Jesus, and shows them how to kneel down and pray.
Saltwater Quarterly
Hungry
