her arms are already around me, lifting me up. “Hmmph,” she says. I can feel the muscles in her back tighten under her dress. She leans one way and then the other, breathing hard. I keep my arms tight around her neck, feeling her sway a little, hearing the unsteady clicks of her heels on the sidewalk. She walks like this for two more blocks, until we get to a brick building that says KERRVILLE COUNTY WELFARE SERVICES across the top in silver letters.
We go inside. Welfare. It is happening.
She sets me down in front of the drinking fountain in the lobby, and my toes curl up when they touch the cool tile. A lady sits behind a desk, her eyes closed, a fan blowing her yellow-orange hair straight back so it looks like she is riding in a convertible car. There are brown chairs against the wall, and my mother and I fall into two of them.
“You have an appointment?” the lady asks. She has to yell over the sound of the fan.
“Barbara Bell, eleven o’clock.”
“Everyone with an eleven o’clock appointment should be in the audio room to the left,” the lady says, pointing to a white door on one side of her desk. “If your appointment is at eleven, you were instructed to arrive at ten forty-five, so you could listen to the tape in its entirety.”
My mother stares at the lady. I am worried that she is counting to ten in her head, and that maybe both the lady and I should go to the other side of the room. But my mother says nothing. She stands up, holds her hand out to me, and leads me through the door.
There are about a dozen people in the next room, their chairs in a circle. This time the chairs are orange. In the center of this circle is a cassette player, playing a tape of a man speaking very slowly. No one is listening to the tape. Some people are talking, and some people are sleeping, their heads tilted back on the chairs. One woman is trying to lullaby a baby, singing a song in Spanish. We take two seats by the door, and I try to think about how good the air-conditioning feels, my feet set free from the shoes, and not about where we are, what Ronald Reagan would think if he could see us here now.
“How are your feet?” my mother asks.
The lady from the first room sticks her head in and says, “Shhh! You-all are supposed to listen to the tape.” She points at her own ear. “No talking!”
But we can’t hear the tape because people are talking, and two different babies are crying. Someone opens a different door and calls my mother’s name. We walk down a long green hallway to a room with four desks, a woman sitting behind each one. Three of them are busy with other people. The fourth one waves us over. “Helloooo?” she says. “Come on. Let’s go.”
She wears red-framed glasses that sit on the tip of her nose. The nameplate on her desk says MRS. BARBARA BELL, INTAKE, and when she sees us, she looks me up and down carefully, puffing out her cheeks like a chipmunk. “We’ll have to do something about shoes for you,” she says. She looks at my mother. “Name?”
“Christina Bucknow,” my mother says. She is all of a sudden using her nice voice, which I have not heard in a while. “Here’s the form they told me to bring. I did the best I could with it.” She smiles. “But some of it was pretty involved. See, this is my first time doing this so—”
Barbara Bell pushes up her glasses and flips through the booklet. She gets out a calculator, her fingers tapping against the buttons quickly. I think she looks very smart, wearing red glasses and punching a calculator like this.
“You’re twenty-seven?”
“Yes.”
“This is your daughter?”
“Yes. This is Evelyn.”
“From a prior marriage?”
“Not exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“No.”
Barbara Bell nods and looks back down. “And she’s ten?”
“She’ll be eleven in August.”
“And you receive no child support from her father?”
“No.”
“But you’ve entered the father’s name in a search, correct?”
“Yes. A long time ago. No luck.”
Barbara Bell leans back in her chair. “And the father of this pregnancy?”
“This new one?” My mother points at her belly.
“Yes. This new one.”
“It doesn’t matter.” My mother smiles.
“Actually, it does. Ms. Bucknow, I have to exhaust all of your other means of support before the state gives you financial assistance. And really, if