“And your mother?”
“She’s an artist,” I said. “And a writer and a teacher.”
“Really?” The man made a note on a pad. “Where?”
“I don’t think Mom and Dad would want me talking to you without them here,” I said. “Come back when they’re here. They’ll answer your questions.”
“Good,” the man said. “I will come back. Tell them that.”
He passed a business card through the crack in the doorway. I watched him make his way down to the ground. “Careful on those stairs now,” I called. “We’re in the process of building a new set.”
After the man left, I was so furious that I ran up the hillside and started hurling rocks — big rocks that it took two hands to lift — into the garbage pit. Except for Erma, I had never hated anyone more than I hated that child-welfare man. Not even Ernie Goad. At least when Ernie and his gang came around yelling that we were trash, we could fight them off with rocks. But if the child-welfare man got it into his head that we were an unfit family, we’d have no way to drive him off. He’d launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen.
I wished we could do the skedaddle. For a long time Brian, Lori, and I had assumed we would leave Welch sooner or later. Every couple of months we’d ask Dad if we were going to move on. He’d sometimes talk about Australia or Alaska, but he never took any action, and when we asked Mom, she’d start singing some song about how her get up and go had got up and went. Maybe coming back to Welch had killed the idea Dad used to have of himself as a man going places. The truth was, we were stuck.
When Mom got home, I gave her the man’s card and told her about his visit. I was still in a lather. I said that since neither she nor Dad could be bothered to work, and since she refused to leave Dad, the government was going to do the job of splitting up the family for her.
I expected Mom to come back with one of her choice remarks, but she listened to my tirade in silence. Then she said she needed to consider her options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had begun painting on plywood, so she picked up a piece of wood, got out her palette, squeezed some paints onto it, and selected a brush.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
Mom worked quickly, automatically, as if she knew exactly what it was she wanted to paint. A figure took shape in the middle of the board. It was a woman from the waist up, with her arms raised. Blue concentric circles appeared around the waist. The blue was water. Mom was painting a picture of a woman drowning in a stormy lake. When she was finished, she sat for a long time in silence, staring at the picture.
“So what are we going to do?” I finally asked.
“Jeannette, you’re so focused it’s scary.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
“I’ll get a job, Jeannette,” she snapped. She threw her paintbrush into the jar that held her turpentine and sat there looking at the drowning woman.
QUALIFIED TEACHERS were so scarce in McDowell County that two of the teachers I’d have at Welch High School had never been to college. Mom was able to land a job by the end of the week. We spent those days frantically trying to clean the house in anticipation of the return of the child-welfare man. It was a hopeless task, given all the stacks of Mom’s junk and the hole in the ceiling and the disgusting yellow bucket in the kitchen. However, for some reason he never came back.
Mom’s job was teaching remedial reading in an elementary school in Davy, a coal-mining camp twelve miles north of Welch. Since we still had no car, the school’s principal arranged for Mom to get a ride with another teacher, Lucy Jo Rose, who had just graduated from Bluefield State College and was so fat she could barely squeeze behind the steering wheel of her brown Dodge Dart. Lucy Jo, whom the principal had more or less ordered to perform this service, took an instant dislike to Mom. She refused to say much during the trip, instead playing Barbara Mandrell tapes and smoking filter-tip Kools the entire time. As soon as Mom got out of the car, Lucy Jo made a big show of spraying Mom’s seat with Lysol. Mom, for her part, felt that Lucy Jo was woefully uninformed. When Mom mentioned Jackson Pollock once, Lucy Jo said that she had Polish blood and therefore did not appreciate Mom using derogatory names for Polish people.
Mom had the same problems she’d had in Battle Mountain with organizing her paperwork and disciplining her students. At least one morning a week, she’d throw a tantrum and refuse to go to work, and Lori, Brian, and I would have to get her collected and down to the street where Lucy Jo waited with a scowl, blue smoke chugging up out of the Dart’s rusted-through tailpipe.
But at least we had money. While I’d been bringing in a little extra cash babysitting, Brian was cutting other people’s weeds, and Lori had a paper route, it didn’t add up to much. Now Mom got paid about seven hundred dollars a month, and the first time I saw her gray-green paycheck, with its detachable stub and automated signatures, I thought our troubles were over. On paydays, Mom took us kids down to the big bank across from the courthouse to cash the check. After the cashier gave her the money, Mom went into a corner of the bank and stuffed it into a sock she’d safety-pinned to her bra. Then we all scurried around to the power company and the water authority and the landlord, paying off our bills with tens and twenties. The clerks averted their eyes as Mom fished the sock out of her bra, explaining to everyone within earshot that this was her way of making sure she was never pickpocketed.
Mom also bought some electric heaters and a refrigerator on layaway, and we’d go to the appliance store and put down a few dollars every month, figuring they’d be ours by wintertime. Mom always had at least one. “extravagance” on layaway, something we really didn’t need — a tasseled silk throw or a cut crystal vase — because she said the surest way to feel rich was to invest in quality nonessentials. After that, we’d go to the grocery store at the bottom of the hill and stock up on staples such as beans and rice, powdered milk, and canned goods. Mom always bought the dented cans, even if they weren’t marked down, because she said they needed to be loved, too.
At home, we’d empty Mom’s purse onto the sofa bed and count the remaining money. There’d be hundreds of dollars, more than enough to cover our expenses until the end of the month, I thought. But month after month, the money would disappear before the next paycheck arrived, and once more I’d find myself rooting in the garbage at school for food.
Toward the end of one month that fall, Mom announced that we had only one dollar for dinner. That was enough to buy one gallon of Neapolitan ice cream, which she said was not only delicious but had lots of calcium and would be good for our bones. We brought the ice cream home, and Brian pulled apart the carton and cut the block into five even slices. I called dibs on first choice. Mom told us to savor it because we had no money for dinner the next night.
“Mom, what happened to it all?” I asked as we ate our ice-cream slices.
“Gone, gone, gone!” she said. “It’s all gone.”
“But where?” Lori asked.
“I’ve got a houseful of kids and a husband who soaks up booze like a sponge,” Mom said. “Making ends meet is harder than you think.”
It couldn’t be that hard, I thought. Other moms did it. I tried quizzing her. Was she spending the money on herself? Was she giving it to Dad? Was Dad stealing it? Or did we go through it quickly? I couldn’t get an answer. “Give us the money,” I said. “We’ll work out a budget and stick to it.”