I had eighteen dollars and no childcare, so I took my eight-month-old to work — and at ten past five the blanket in the linen store was empty.
Eighteen dollars and forty-six cents.
That is what was in my account on the morning of Thursday the sixteenth of October, with rent due on the twenty-first.
Mrs Veck rang me at twenty past six in the morning.
She is seventy-one and she has had Fern three days a week since the June and she is the reason I have a job at all.
And she sounded frightened, which I had never heard from her, and she said her doctor had told her to rest and that she did not think she could safely have the baby that day.
I rang four people in forty minutes.
One did not answer. One wanted two hundred dollars for an afternoon. One could do next Tuesday.
And I sat on the edge of my bed with Fern on my knee for about an hour trying to invent a fifth option.
There wasn’t one.
I had been late twice in six weeks — buses and a hospital appointment — and I had been spoken to about it on the ninth.
One more and I was out, and that job pays the rent and the formula and Fern’s prescriptions.
So I packed a bag.
