Chapter 5
She didn’t ask his name. She didn’t say she was sorry for his loss, and he would have hated her if she had.
She stopped at the edge of the grave, looked down into it for a moment, and then crouched and laid the flowers on the lid of the coffin — not arranged, not placed carefully, just laid down the way you set something down when you’ve been carrying it a long way.
Then she stayed.
The gravediggers came forward, and the older one said they couldn’t close it out until the balance was settled. He said it flatly, no cruelty in it, the tone of a man who has said it to hundreds of families. He said there was the IOU, and the digging fee, and the marker.
Raphael had eleven dollars. He had a bus token. He had a plastic bag with a change of clothes in it. He did not have the money, and he had never in his life had to stand in the rain and say that out loud to another human being, and he was trying to find the words when the girl stood up.
She reached into the pocket of that gas-station raincoat and took out a fold of bills. Cash, soft from being folded and unfolded, mostly ones, a couple of fives. What a person counted at the end of a shift at a flower stand outside a cemetery.
She held it out to the gravedigger.
“That’s everything from today,” she said. “It’s not all of it. I get paid again Thursday, and I know where your office is, and I’ll bring the rest.”
The old man looked at the money, then at her, then at Raphael, and something moved across his face that wasn’t quite pity. He took it. He wrote something on a slip of paper and gave it to her, and she folded it and put it in her pocket, and Raphael understood, with a kind of dull shock, that she had just accepted a debt in her own name for a stranger’s brother.
He said the only thing he could get out of his throat.
“Why?”
She thought about it. Actually thought about it — she didn’t answer right away, she looked down at the coffin with the carnations on it and considered the question like it deserved one.
“Nobody should go in the ground without flowers,” she said. “That’s all.”
The gravediggers started filling it in. She stayed for that too, through all of it, standing in the rain with her hands in her pockets, a girl of maybe twenty with no umbrella and no reason to be there. When the last of the mud was packed down she nodded — at the grave, not at him — turned, and walked back the way she had come, between the rows, past the gates, out into the wet gray street.
He never learned her name. He never saw her face clearly enough to be sure he’d know it again. He had eleven dollars, a bus token, and a debt to a girl he could not have described to a police sketch artist, and for seven years that had been the single most unbearable fact of his life.
Now the car was parked outside the gates of that same cemetery, and he was sitting in it in the dark, and her name was in a file in a plastic folder on the passenger seat.
Delaney Hart. Flower stand, outside the gates.
·
Three days later, the mailbox in the lobby on the west side of the city had an envelope in it with no return address and no stamp, hand-delivered, containing a single page: the name of a lawyer, and a date, and the words no charge to you, for as long as it takes.
Delaney read it four times standing up, and then put it in the drawer with the recipe book and the two dollars she had left of the week, and did not call.
Because she didn’t trust it. Because in her experience, help arrived with a bill attached, and she could not afford another bill, and she could not afford hope either — hope was a thing that made you slow.
What she did instead was take a double shift under the table at a diner that paid cash, and say yes to a Saturday cleaning job that started at five in the morning, and stand in front of a mirror two nights before the hearing practicing the sentence she was going to say out loud in a room with a judge in it.
I have stable employment and stable housing.
On the morning of the hearing, the caseworker met her in the corridor and told her there had been a motion filed to have the case reviewed by a different court — a motion paid for by an outside party, requesting a full inquiry into the household, including a review of the child’s school records, the residence, and “the character of the custodial arrangement.”
The hearing was continued.
·
It took Delaney nine days to find out who had filed it.
She found out from a woman at the diner who used to work for a foundation downtown, who made one phone call out of curiosity, and who told her over the dish rack, quietly, that the request had come through the offices of the Ashford Foundation.
Delaney stood there with a wet plate in her hand for a long moment. She set it down carefully on the stack.
Camille Ashford had never once in her life looked at her as a person. She had looked at her as an object that had embarrassed her in front of four hundred people — and objects don’t get to have stable housing and stable employment and a brother, not when they are the only thing on earth within reach.
Three weeks later, a social worker came to the apartment with a scheduled visit and a clipboard and asked Owen, in a friendly voice, whether he sometimes did his own laundry, and whether his sister ever came home late, and how often he was alone.
Owen answered everything honestly. That was the worst part. He answered everything honestly, with his dinosaur cup in both hands, because he was eight and nobody had ever told him that being honest could be a weapon.
They gave Delaney forty-five days to demonstrate stability, with a review of the placement in between. If the review went the wrong way, Owen would go into a temporary home while the case was resolved — temporary, the woman said, twice, and both times it sounded less like a promise and more like a word they’d been trained to use.
May you like
Delaney walked the social worker to the door and thanked her, and closed it, and stood with her forehead against the wood for a long time while her brother asked from the kitchen whether she was okay.
Everything she had built with two eggs and a bent fork and an expired lease was now inside the reach of a woman who could end it with a phone call, and that phone call had already been made.
