The Coaching

The state sent a caseworker twice a year, a woman named Ms. Kowalski who'd been assigned to our house for exactly one visit so far, the previous fall, and who Denise had spent two full days preparing us for like we were rehearsing a school play.

"You're happy here," Denise told Ruby, crouching to her eye level with a patience she never showed the rest of the year. "You like your room. You like the food. If she asks about bruises, you fell off the swing set, remember?"

Ruby nodded, wide-eyed, already rehearsing the sentence in her head the way you could see kids doing when they were young enough to still take instructions like this literally.

I got a different kind of coaching, because Denise had figured out somewhere along the way that I was old enough to actually think about what I was saying instead of just repeating it. "You're eleven now, Dominic. Old enough to understand that if this house gets shut down, you don't go somewhere better. You go somewhere new, and new is always worse for the first six months. You want that for Ruby? For Sam?"

It wasn't really a threat. It didn't need to be. It was just true, and she knew I knew it was true, which made it more effective than any threat could have been.

When Ms. Kowalski came, I said all the right things. Happy. Fine. Fell off the swing set. I watched her write it all down without much change in her expression, and I told myself I'd done the responsible thing, the protective thing, the math that kept four kids in one house instead of four kids in four worse ones.

Three weeks later, Denise brought home a fifth bed, and then, before the ink on that paperwork was even dry, a sixth.