Chapter 3 - "You're Not Splitting Us Up"
Dale showed up three days later, walked through the living room, and started shaking his head before he even sat down.
"This is a lot, Meredith. This is a whole lot."
"It's five kids, Dale. They come as a set."
"Our place has two bedrooms. Brenda's hours got cut back. We could maybe take Micah — he's older, he can pull his weight. The rest, I don't know. We spread them around. Somebody in the family takes one each."
"Spread them around."
"You're making it sound ugly."
"It is ugly."
Cora was in the doorway with her arms crossed. "We're not 'the rest.' And nobody is spreading us anywhere."
"You're fifteen, Cora. The adults are talking."
"Then start acting like one."
Dale left that night and didn't come back.
A week later a county caseworker sat at my kitchen table with a folder. Because Elliot and I had never married, the paper he'd signed didn't make me anyone's legal guardian. If no relative stepped forward and passed the checks, she said gently, the children would most likely be placed — and with five of them and no home big enough, that almost always meant separate houses. Maybe different counties.
I called my mother that night.
"Walk away," Sharon said. "This is your way out and it landed right in your lap. You are not lighting your future on fire because that man didn't have the spine to stay."
"They're going to split them up, Mom. Five kids, five houses."
"That is not your job to fix."
"I stood in that doorway tonight and watched them line up on the couch, and I pictured strangers loading them into different cars. So it's my job now."
I hung up on her.
Because I'd been one of their main caregivers for months, the county let me apply as fictive kin. Background check. Home study. Financial review. Emergency-placement training, at night, after work. The landlord agreed to put the Bellamy Street lease in my name so the kids wouldn't lose the one house they had left.
It got approved.
May you like
The kids had survivor benefits from their mom. I got foster assistance. Grace Methodist ran a meal train and covered school supplies more than once. I worked days at Kettle Creek Textiles and sewed uniforms at the kitchen table at night, and some months I still stood in the grocery aisle doing math and putting things back.
We built a system. Cora learned to cook. Micah fixed anything that rattled. Hazel ran the laundry schedule. Owen complained about dish duty while quietly doing more than his share. Poppy kept calling me Mama.
