Rather than making a dry comment about a sister who sometimes took a vacation from her problems, she felt tears hit the backs of her eyes. Instead of thinking her usual, I can do this, she thought, I can’t. Not when she’d done it so many times before. It had been different when Porsha had only disappeared for a weekend, but the stretches were growing longer and Mercedes knew it was because she enabled her.
This wasn’t drugs, though. It was children. You didn’t tough love someone by refusing to show up for helpless kids who couldn’t look out for themselves.
“I can’t—” take them back to Holbrook, she tried to say, but the lump in her throat was growing too big. She tried to swallow and wound up making a pathetic choking sound.
Janice read Mercedes’ distress and her expression melted into something she probably wore when one of her charges took a hard spill. She reached out with a sympathetic hand.
It was the first sign of compassion Mercedes had experienced since she had argued with her mother about taking the kids back to Porsha’s apartment. From everyone else, it had been nothing but arguments that she shouldn’t be looking after the kids.
But if not her, who?
“Do you want to sit down and talk? Let me tell my partner,” Janice said, hurrying inside.
Minutes later, Janice pressed a lukewarm instant coffee into Mercedes weak hands. She seemed so kind, with her frizzy brunette hair and cheerful buttercup T-shirt and her willingness to listen.
Mercedes sank onto a bench beside her, kept her voice low, but told Janice as much as she had to. She didn’t get into her own childhood of men coming and going from their mother’s life, speaking in innuendo and touching without welcome until she and her sister began looking for their own men to protect and provide for them. Mercedes hadn’t magically woken up with her head on straight with a good job and a decent level of self-respect. If she’d been able to get pregnant, she probably would have wound up raising a couple of kids on welfare, too. She wasn’t above having a few drinks at the end of a tough day. She wasn’t perfect, so she tried not to judge Porsha too harshly for the way she behaved.
But her sister was crossing a line.
“It’s not that she doesn’t love them. She knows I’ll always take them, is the problem. She just doesn’t realize...” She heard the codependence in her words and trailed off.
Janice nodded. “I’ve been at this for ten years and wish I could say this is the first time I’d heard anything like this, but it happens. Parenting is tough and when other factors come into play, money pressures or job loss…” She skipped mentioning alcohol and drugs, which was yet another kindness Mercedes appreciated in her. “At least they have you stepping in. They’re very lucky.”
“But that’s the problem. I have to work. My employers have already bent over backwards for me. I can’t keep taking advantage of that.”
More nodding, now with the tight smile of a hard truth on its way. “But do you realize that if you want to put them into any licensed daycare, you’ll have to provide medical information? You’ll have to sign the same permission for medical care you can’t get for yourself. If you can’t get Ayjia’s cut looked after, you won’t be able to register her anywhere. You might find something private, but I have to be honest. That’s hit or miss.”
“Oh, fudge,” Mercedes muttered, not having thought of that. She tried to reach into her purse for her phone and wound up knocking it off the bench. It hit the gravel at her feet. “Double fudge.”
Janice picked it up for her. “Can I give you a number? It’s a social worker we talk to sometimes. She’s really great. Very child-focused.”
Mercedes drew a breath, wanting to say a firm, No. Grim memories surfaced of that awful woman who had taken her and Porsha from their mother because their mother’s boyfriend had been arrested. It had only been a few days, but they’d been left in a house that stank of dog and mold, sharing bunk beds that stank of urine and despair.
Whenever she thought of social services, her mind went straight back to that dilapidated house. Her greatest fear was that Porsha’s kids would wind up somewhere like that, too scared to climb the stairs to the kitchen and ask for something to eat.
“Just talk to her. Find out what your options are,” Janice urged. “I think you’ll really like her.”
It was just a phone number.
Mercedes squeaked out a defeated, “Okay.”
Janice made the call for Mercedes, booking an appointment for the afternoon while a plump woman named Barbara checked Ayjia’s chin and agreed medical attention was a good idea.
Mercedes drove back to the complex with the weight of too much responsibility depressing her mood.
“I didn’t want to stay there anyway,” Ayjia said as Mercedes parked the car and climbed out into what was shaping up to be a scorching spring day. “I want to be with you, Auntie M.”
“I want to go to a real playground,” Dayton said.
Mercedes glanced at her watch then over to the front office where she should have been a week ago, instead of in Holbrook, fruitlessly waiting for Porsha.
“If I take you to the park for a little bit now, can you sit quietly while I have my meeting later? No jumping on furniture like yesterday?”
“That was Dayton’s idea,” Ayjia said.
“You did it, too.”
“I don’t care what happened yesterday. Do we have a deal for today?” Mercedes slammed the car door with her hip and motioned the kids onto the sidewalk that led to the pedestrian gate.
“Yes,” both kids chimed together.
“All right,” Mercedes turned to close the gate behind them only to hear Ayjia say, “Hey, there’s Zack.”
Sure enough a cyclist coasted toward them from a side street. Mercedes recognized the yellow and green helmet. Zack had strapped it on yesterday before lifting his slick racing bike out of the back of a well used pick-up truck—the kind where virginities were lost on old wool blankets.
For a moment, she wondered if L.C. kept a blanket behind the driver’s seat, then Zack braked beside her and lowered his sunglasses, his smile genuine enough to make her smile back. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Mercedes checked her watch. Still forty minutes to go before the meeting. “Are you early or just out for exercise?”
“Uh, yeah. Exercise. Before it gets too hot.” His gaze slid sideways and he pushed his sunglasses back into place.
Lying. Huh.
Mercedes resisted Ayjia’s tug on her hand. “And you rode all the way over here? ‘Cause we’re a long way from the college.”
“Dad and I are staying at the motel by the highway.” He jerked his elbow in the direction of the interstate.
“Oh. Right.” But it didn’t explain why he and his friends had been all the way over here a couple of nights ago.
“Auntie M,” Ayjia insisted. “Dayton’s way ahead.”
“Oh. Okay, let’s go. Um, Zack?” Mercedes said over her shoulder, letting Ayjia drag her toward the park two blocks away.
He balanced one foot on a pedal as he rolled beside her. “Yeah?”
“Do you have a minute? Or do you have to get back and clean up?”
“No, I can talk.”
“At the park, if you don’t mind. It’ll be easier for me if the kids are playing on the monkey bar— Dayton, wait at the gate!” she called.
Dayton stopped running and sagged his shoulders at her.
“I’ll catch up to him,” Zack said, his bike clicking as he picked up speed.
“Thanks. It’s too hot to...run,” she finished, as Ayjia pulled away from her grip and took off.
Mercedes trotted to stay in sight of the kids, catching up to everyone at the swings where the children bickered over who Zack would push first.
The scent of mown grass hung on the air, but the park was quiet and empty but for a pair of moms with strollers, watching over toddlers in the sandbox. Of course they had toddlers. Older kids were supposed to be in school.
Mercedes avoided their curious gazes and watched Zack rest his bike against a bench. “It’s all right,” she told him. “I can push them.”
“I don’t mind. I have to stand here while you try to convince me to drop the idea of serving community hours, right?”
“Not exactly, but—”
“Push me first, Zack,” Ayjia said.
“No, me.”
“I can push both of you. Watch.” Zack spread his arms to their full, six-foot span and ran forward, flinging both kids into the air, then walking around behind them to alternate nudges that kept them flying.
“More,” Dayton demanded.
“More, please,” Mercedes corrected, and nodded at Zack’s questioning look, giving him permission to let Dayton set the height.
“It’s not that I want to discourage you,” Mercedes said when he had the kids zooming. “It’s just that I have my own...” her stomach knotted, “situation to explain to the board. They’re not going to be very receptive on the heels of my standing up for you so I want to be very sure I’m not wasting my time doing that.”
“Mmm.” He shrugged his shoulder to catch a trickle of sweat sliding down his chin. “How do I convince you I’m worth it?”