Page 4 of Marrying the Pakhan

“Like what? I can’t quit my job in four days and still pay rent.”

“I’m not saying quit. I’m saying if there’s anything—family support, a partner, anyone who’d be a second stable adult in that home—now’s the time.” She watches my face while she says it, like she already knows there isn’t anyone and she’s asking anyway because it’s her job to ask.

“There isn’t.”

“Okay,” she says. “Then we go into Thursday with what we’ve got. Character letters. Marisol, your manager. I want testimony that this arrangement is working, not just happening.”

I nod like that’s a plan and not a prayer. She talks me through the rest of it, and I write down everything in the small notebook I’ve started carrying for exactly this.

If I don’t write it down, I’ll spend the drive home rewriting the whole conversation in my head. Badly.

By the time I leave her office, the sun’s dropped low enough that it’s coming straight through the windshield. I drive the fifteen minutes to pick up Ginger with my hand up against the glare like a visor, one word doing laps in my skull.

Thursday.

Mrs. Bennett, who watches three kids from the house down the block until Marisol takes over, already has Ginger’s backpack zipped and her shoes on when I get there.

Ginger’s sitting on the porch step with a drawing in her lap. When she sees my car, she doesn’t run to it the way she used to. She stands up slowly, holding the paper flat, as if it might tear if she moves too fast.

“Hi, baby.” I crouch down when she gets close.

“I drew Mom.” She holds the paper out flat so I can see it properly. There’s my sister in crayon, orange hair, too many fingers on each hand, standing next to a stick-figure Ginger under a sun with a face on it. “Mrs. Bennett said I could bring it home.”

“It’s beautiful.” My throat tightens, and I swallow past it, because this is not the moment to fall apart on a stranger’s porch. “Can we put it on the fridge?”

“Next to the other one?”

“Right next to the other one.”

She nods like that settles something important, and climbs into the back seat without me having to ask twice, buckling herself in.

Mrs. Bennett tells me Ginger ate all her snack and asked twice when I was picking her up. She says it like it’s nothing. It lands heavy in my chest anyway.

We stop for gas on the way home, and Ginger asks from the back seat, apropos of absolutely nothing, whether her grandparents are nice.

I nearly drop the gas cap. “Why do you ask that?”

“Mrs. Bennett said they called the school to ask questions.”

I file that away for Denise, later, when I’m not standing at a gas pump with my hands shaking slightly.

“They love you a lot,” I force myself to say, which is true, and also the only part of the sentence I trust myself to speak out loud right now. “That’s why they’re asking.”

Ginger considers this with the seriousness of someone twice her age. “Okay,” she says, and goes back to looking out the window. I get back in the car and drive the rest of the way with my jaw locked so tight it aches by the time we’re home.

I make dinner. I do the bath. I read two chapters of the book with the dragon on the cover, doing the voices Ginger likes even though my heart’s not remotely in it tonight.

By the time she’s asleep, it’s nearly nine. I’m sitting at my kitchen table with Denise’s folder open in front of me and a legal pad covered in my own handwriting that gets worse the further down the page it goes.

Six waking hours a week with a stable adult. Marital status: single. Household income: insufficient.

I read that last line four times.

Renata’s voice comes back to me uninvited.

You should hire a husband. Judges like married people.

I laugh out loud alone in my kitchen. However, it comes out sounding less like a laugh and more like something breaking.