V. The Dependents - Part One

The alarm went off at 4:45 and Teresa was already awake. She'd been awake since 4:12, which she knew because the clock on the nightstand was digital and red and the red was the only light in the room and she'd been looking at it for thirty-three minutes, watching the numbers change, doing the math.

The math was always running. It ran the way the refrigerator ran — constant, low, in the background of every waking moment and some of the sleeping ones. Rent: fourteen hundred. Electric: eighty to one-twenty depending on the season. Gas: forty. Water: thirty-five. Car payment: two-eighty-seven. Car insurance: one-sixty. Groceries: four-fifty if she was careful and she was always careful. Marcos's inhaler copay: twenty-five, twice a month. Ana's school fees — the activity fee, the technology fee, the field trip fees that came home in envelopes she opened standing at the counter: twelve here, eighteen there, thirty-five for the science museum, each one a small extraction, a precise removal of money she had already allocated. Her own health insurance through the warehouse: eighty-two per paycheck, biweekly, deducted before the check arrived so that the number she saw on the stub was already diminished, already less than what she'd earned, the gap between the gross and the net a kind of tax on the act of having a body that required maintenance.

She made seventeen dollars and fifty cents an hour. She worked forty hours a week, sometimes forty-four when overtime was available, which was less often since the facility had automated the east wing. Gross monthly: approximately three thousand and thirty-three dollars. Net, after deductions: two thousand four hundred and eighteen. The bills totaled two thousand five hundred and twelve. The gap was ninety-four dollars. She covered the gap with what she could — plasma donations at forty-five dollars a visit, twice a week when her veins cooperated and the facility on Ash Street wasn't overbooked. Aluminum cans from the break room recycling bin at the warehouse, which her supervisor pretended not to notice. A neighbor, Mrs. Campos, who paid her twenty dollars on Saturday mornings to drive her to the grocery store because Mrs. Campos's license had been revoked and the bus route had been cut.

The gap was ninety-four dollars and the gap was her life. The gap was the distance between surviving and not surviving, and she crossed it every month the way you cross a bridge that sways — not looking down, not stopping, trusting the structure to hold because the alternative to trusting was standing still and standing still was not an option when you had two children asleep in the next room and the rent was due on the first and the first was always coming.

She got up. She showered. The water pressure was low — it had been low since October, when the building's main valve developed a leak the landlord hadn't fixed. She dressed in the dark: jeans, steel-toe boots, the warehouse polo with the company logo over the left breast. She took two ibuprofen from the bottle on the bathroom shelf and swallowed them dry. Her knees. Her knees had been a problem since her mid-thirties, the cartilage worn from years of standing on concrete, and the pain was a companion now, not an event — the low steady ache of a body that has been used hard and maintained cheaply, the way a machine is used hard and maintained cheaply when the owner cannot afford to replace it and cannot afford to let it stop.

She drove to the warehouse. The car was a 2011 Civic with a hundred and sixty-eight thousand miles and a check-engine light that had been on since March. The drive was fourteen minutes. She clocked in at 5:28. She picked orders for eight hours — walking the aisles, scanning barcodes, pulling product, building pallets. The work was measured in units per hour, and the units per hour were tracked on a screen above the floor manager's desk, and the screen was visible from every aisle, and the names on the screen were sorted by productivity, and Teresa's name was always in the top ten because she could not afford to not be in the top ten because the bottom ten were the ones they let go when the next round of automation came.

She took ibuprofen at 9:30 and at 1:30 and at 5:30 on the drive home. She did not think about what the ibuprofen was doing to her stomach lining because thinking about it didn't change the math and the math required her knees and her knees required the ibuprofen and the ibuprofen required a stomach and the stomach would hold or it wouldn't and either way the rent was due on the first.

She came home at 6:15. Ana had made dinner — rice and beans, the pot still on the stove, a plate wrapped in foil on the counter with a napkin beneath it and a fork on top, placed precisely the way Ana placed everything, with the care of a fourteen-year-old who has been the adult in the apartment for two years and who has learned that the placement of a fork on a plate is a kind of message. The message was: I'm here. I did this. You don't have to.

Ana was at the kitchen table doing homework. Algebra. She had Miguel's focus — the jaw set, the pencil gripped too tight, the way concentration manifested in her body as a kind of compression, everything tightening inward toward the problem until the problem gave or she did. She didn't look up when Teresa came in. This was not rudeness. This was Ana's version of respect — not making her mother perform arrival, not requiring the greeting that would remind both of them that the day had been long and the apartment was small and the absence at the table was permanent.

Miguel had been dead for two years. A loaded pallet — forty-eight cases of canned tomatoes, roughly two thousand pounds — fell from a forklift in the receiving bay of a distribution center that was not the distribution center Teresa worked at but was close enough that she knew the layout, knew the aisles, knew the specific way a pallet sounds when it shifts on the forks and the specific silence that follows when it falls. Workers' comp paid for the funeral. The wrongful death suit dissolved when the company restructured — reorganized, renamed, the legal entity that had employed Miguel ceasing to exist six months after Miguel ceased to exist, the corporation dying a bureaucratic death that carried no weight and left no ash and cost no one their knees. There was a GoFundMe. It raised four thousand dollars. Four thousand dollars for a man who had made espresso on a Bialetti every morning and who had built things with his hands and whose son had inherited the building and whose daughter had inherited the jaw.

Marcos was in the living room. He'd built something — a structure, cardboard and tape, that occupied the space between the couch and the television stand. It had a door, a window cut from a cereal box, and a flag made from a popsicle stick and a piece of notebook paper on which he'd drawn a skull and crossbones. He was inside it. She could see his feet sticking out of the door.

"Hey, baby."

"Hey, Mom." His voice was muffled. "Come in. I built you a throne."

She looked at the structure. She looked at the couch cushions he'd arranged inside it — piled, layered, the architecture of comfort assembled by a child who understood that his mother was tired in a way he could not fix but could furnish. She took off her boots. She crawled through the cardboard door. She sat on the cushions. He put a blanket on her lap. It was a fleece blanket with a pattern of soccer balls on it, a blanket Miguel had bought at a dollar store years ago, and the fleece was pilling and thin and the soccer balls were faded and the blanket smelled like the apartment, which smelled like rice and laundry detergent and the particular warmth of a space occupied by people who cannot afford to heat it properly and compensate with blankets and bodies and the residual warmth of cooking.

She sat in the throne. Marcos sat beside her. He leaned against her arm. His weight was forty-three pounds the last time she'd checked — underweight for his age, the pediatrician said, not alarmingly but enough to recommend a nutritional supplement she could not afford at fourteen dollars a bottle, and she'd bought one bottle and it had lasted three weeks and she hadn't bought a second.

She ate the rice and beans. She watched Marcos add a turret to his structure. She thought about the pamphlet.

The pamphlet was in her purse, inside an envelope, inside the purse. She'd picked it up three weeks ago at the county benefits office, where she'd gone to recertify for SNAP. It had been on a rack in the waiting area, between a brochure for utility assistance and a flyer for a free dental clinic. The pamphlet was glossy. The photos showed people — diverse, smiling, the stock-photography smile of Americans in an advertisement for something that was not a product but a service. The tagline read: Invest in Their Future.

The Dependent Security Initiative. DSI. Federal program. The terms were clear, printed in a sans-serif font on heavy stock: eligible participants enter voluntary biometric suspension. Duration: indefinite. In exchange, designated dependents receive a monthly disbursement equivalent to the participant's projected lifetime earnings, calculated by actuarial table and adjusted for inflation, distributed until the youngest dependent reaches age twenty-six.

She'd read the pamphlet at the kitchen table after the children were asleep. She'd read it three times. The first time she read it the way she read everything — quickly, looking for the catch, the fine print, the exclusion that would disqualify her. There was no catch. The second time she read it she did the math. If she entered the program, Ana and Marcos would receive $3,200 per month. Every month. Until Marcos turned twenty-six. That was fifteen years of payments. That was $576,000. That was dental. That was the inhaler without the copay calculation. That was college — not the fantasy of college, not the maybe someday if we save of college, but the actual, funded, real-number reality of two children going to school because their mother had done a thing that the pamphlet called investing and that the world would call something else.

The third time she read it she didn't read the words. She looked at the photos. The smiling people. She looked at their faces and she understood that the smiles were not smiles of happiness but smiles of completion — the expression of people who had finished a calculation and arrived at an answer and the answer, though it was not the answer they would have chosen, was the only answer the numbers allowed.

She did the math on the back of an envelope. The electric bill, the one due in nine days. She wrote the numbers in pencil, small, in the margin beside the return address. Monthly income: $2,418. Monthly expenses: $2,512. Gap: -$94. She drew a line. Below the line: DSI disbursement: $3,200/month. She drew another line. She looked at the two numbers. The number above the line was her life. The number below the line was her death. The number below the line was larger.

She put the pamphlet inside the envelope. She put the envelope in her purse. She turned off the light above the stove. The kitchen went dark. She stood in the dark kitchen and she pressed her hands flat on the counter where Miguel used to make his coffee — his coffee, not the machine coffee, the stovetop espresso he'd made every morning with the Bialetti his mother had given them, the Bialetti that was still in the cabinet above the stove because Teresa could not bring herself to remove it and could not bring herself to use it — and she pressed her hands on the counter and the counter was cold and the cold came through her palms and she stood there until the cold reached her wrists and then she went to bed.

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