Chapter 10
That morning Lauren ironed her light blue button-up shirt at our kitchen counter while I sat on a stool and watched the creases disappear. She didn't hum like she usually did. She kept checking her phone, then the clock on the microwave, then my backpack by the door that she had packed even though it wasn't a school day.
Mrs. Alvarez from next door knocked at eight thirty. She had brought banana bread and wore her church parking lot volunteer name tag even though it was Thursday. Lauren knelt down so her face was level with mine. Her hand was warm on my shoulder.
"You'll stay with Mrs. Alvarez while I go to a meeting, okay?" she said. "Two hours. Your bag has your inhaler right on top."
I nodded. I kept my hand on the clear plastic of the spacer in my backpack's front pocket. Diane stood in the hallway behind us, arms not crossed for once, just holding a coffee mug. She didn't say anything. She hadn't spoken to Lauren since Lauren told her the lockbox stayed.
After Lauren left, Mrs. Alvarez let me sit at her kitchen table and do a reading worksheet. Her house smelled like coffee and laundry sheets. Through her front window I could see our house and Lauren's car backing out. Mrs. Alvarez didn't ask me about the police or the inhaler. She just set a glass of water next to me and said, "If you need anything, you tap my arm."
At eleven fifteen Lauren's car pulled back in. She didn't come straight to get me. She sat in the driveway for a minute with both hands on the wheel. I watched her breathe. Mrs. Alvarez saw it too and squeezed my shoulder lightly.
Lauren came in and her eyes were red but not from crying. She looked like she'd been listening hard.
That night after Mrs. Alvarez went home and Diane had gone upstairs, Lauren sat on the edge of my bed and told me where she'd been. She spoke slow, the way she did when she wanted me to remember.
The foundation tower downtown was just offices, she said. Not what I imagined. No ballroom, no charity gala. Just a dented glass building on Main with a faded sign that said Harper Family Foundation. Inside, a woman at the front desk buzzed her up to the third floor. The meeting room had a long table and too-bright lights and a water pitcher nobody touched.
There were six other parents there. Lauren sat next to a dad with a baby carrier. The caseworker who ran it was a woman named Ms. Bennett. She wore a gray blazer and had a stack of folders. She didn't use soft language. She said, "We're here because home isn't safe enough right now, and you need options that don't depend on someone else changing."
Ms. Bennett put a map of the county on the table and pointed to three apartment buildings that took emergency vouchers. She talked about legal aid in the same breath, like they went together. She gave Lauren a blue sheet with a number for housing assistance and a pink sheet with a number for the courthouse self-help office. She said Lauren qualified for both.
Lauren told me she asked, "Do I have to move Maya or can I ask my mother to leave?"
Ms. Bennett didn't answer right away. She said she couldn't make the choice for her, but the house was in Lauren's name, and a protective order could let Lauren and her daughter stay while the other person found other housing. She said that was often more stable for a child with a medical need. She said, "If the medication needs to stay with the child, the home has to stay with the child too."
Lauren said her hand shook when she wrote that down. She said the foundation staffer by the door, a man with a clipboard, added that there was a small grant that could cover the lock for the bedroom and the first month if she needed to change the locks legally. He didn't push. He just slid the form across the table.
On my bed, Lauren folded the blue sheet and the pink sheet and smoothed them with her palm. She'd brought them home in her purse.
"I thought we would have to leave," she whispered. "I thought we would have to pack you up and sleep somewhere else. But Ms. Bennett said we can ask the court to let us stay. To make the house yours and mine again."
I held my inhaler box on my lap. The plastic crinkled.
"Are we going to move?" I asked.
Lauren looked at the door, where we could hear Diane's TV upstairs.
May you like
"No," she said. "I'm going to ask her to leave. Not you. I have the papers to do it right. I have a path now."
She didn't say Diane would agree. She just put the sheets in my bedside drawer, right next to my breathing log, and zipped my backpack closed with the inhaler still on top.
