Chapter 3 - Nine Days
I worked.
I cleared out the workshop. I built two sets of bunk beds myself. I'd never built a bunk bed in my life, so I downloaded plans and adjusted them based on what I knew about load and bracing. I built them so solid you could park a truck on them.
I bought bedding in five different colors so every kid would have one thing that was theirs and nobody else's. I bought five car seats. I called a family attorney named Diane Vasquez, told her the whole story, heard her number, and paid it.
Then I emptied the account I'd spent four years filling.
On day eight, Marlene called. The agency would back my application—if I passed an emergency home study.
The evaluator showed up inside twenty-four hours. Her name was Yvonne. She walked through my house with a clipboard. Bedrooms. Kitchen. Bathrooms. Backyard. Then she stood in the converted workshop and looked at the bunk beds a long time.
"You built these."
"Yes, ma'am."
"When?"
"Last week."
She wrote something down.
She asked about childcare. I told her I could cut my hours for about four months. After that, I'd already talked to two local daycares, one with sliding-scale rates, and Paige had agreed to cover school pickups when a job ran long.
She asked about trauma. About discipline. About my support system. About the fact that I'd never parented anyone.
Then she asked, "What don't you know?"
Easiest question of the day.
"A lot."
She waited.
"I don't know what to do when a kid wakes up screaming because he dreamed about his mom. I don't know what five grieving kids need all at the same time. I don't know what Elijah needs from me specifically, or Adeline, or Danny, or Melody, or the baby."
"But?"
"But I know what happens if nobody takes them together."
She looked at me.
"They get split up," I said. "Elijah's seven. He called 911 when his mother collapsed on the kitchen floor. He's been holding his brothers and sisters together every day since. I can give him a place where he doesn't have to do that by himself."
Yvonne wrote something else.
The next morning Marlene called again. The home study came back supportive. The hearing was set for one o'clock. I had forty-eight hours.
Diane told me the judge would ask why I was doing this, and she warned me not to hand him some polished hero speech. Judges hear rehearsed sincerity every single day.
So for two days I dug for my real reason.
There wasn't one clean answer. Maybe that was the answer.
My own father left when I was three. My mom worked two jobs. Paige is four years older than me, and for most of our childhood she was more parent than sister. I grew up watching a kid solve problems that were never supposed to land on a kid.
Elijah was seven. He'd made the call. He'd been carrying four younger kids for three weeks.
I didn't understand yet what raising five traumatized children would actually take. The state's attorney was right about that.
But I understood exactly what it costs a kid to become the responsible one.
And there was one more thing. For two years I'd been living alone in a house that always felt like I'd built it for something I couldn't name. Then I saw those five kids on that bench, and something just clicked into place.
May you like
That was what the house was for.
I know how that sounds. It was sentimental. It was also true.
