She froze. Her fingers went to the hem of her hoodie.
Sam had come in behind me. “Lizie. You didn’t tell me it was this bad.”
Backpacks
Dan appeared in the doorway, reading the room before reading anything else.
I held up the envelope. “Sweetheart. Are you and your dad in danger of losing your home?”
She stared at the floor. When she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet I had to lean forward.
“My dad said not to tell anybody. He said it’s nobody’s business.”
“Lizie, that’s not quite true,” I said. I kept my voice the way I kept it during Sam’s worst nights, the years when she was small and afraid of things I could not see. “We care about you. But we can’t help if we don’t know what’s happening.”
She shook her head. Tears were building but not falling, like she had learned that crying used up energy she didn’t have.
Dictionaries & Encyclopedias
“He says if people know, they’ll look at us differently. Like we’re begging.”
Dan crouched down beside us, bringing himself to her level.
“Is there anywhere else you could stay? Family? A friend?”
“We tried my aunt. She has four kids in a two-bedroom place. There wasn’t room.”
Sam sat down beside her. “You don’t have to keep this hidden from us. We’ll figure something out together.”
Child Care
I nodded. “You’re not alone in this. Not anymore.”
Lizie was quiet for a long moment. Then she looked at the cracked screen of her phone.
“Should I call my dad? He’s going to be upset I said anything.”
“Let me talk to him,” I said. “All we want is to help.”
Paul Came to the Door with Oil Stains on His Jeans and Exhaustion on His Face — and He Tried to Smile Anyway
He shook Dan’s hand at the door with the careful dignity of a man who has not stopped working even while everything around him has been collapsing.
“I’m Paul. Thank you for feeding her. I’m sorry for the trouble.”
“Helena,” I said. “And it hasn’t been any trouble, Paul. But Lizie is carrying things no child should carry.”
He glanced at the papers on the table. His jaw tightened.
“She had no business bringing that here.”
Then his face did something I recognized — it crumpled the way faces crumple when the thing a person has been holding together comes apart in the wrong moment in front of the wrong people, which is to say any moment and any people.
“I thought I could fix it. I just needed more time. If I worked more hours—”
“She needs more than longer hours, Paul,” Dan said. Not harshly, but directly. “She needs food and sleep and the chance to just be a kid. Right now she’s planning evacuation lists.”
