patronizing, naive—but at least it was in the direction of health and for the purpose of good. Yes, my own unproductive hours on the university tenure clock and unwritten pages went whizzing by, and if I’d invested even half the hours I spent on Jessica, much less the boys, on our marriage instead, who knows how much healthier and better a wife I would be. Nonetheless, I hoped that Jessica would acquire some momentum and agency, recover some long-stolen sense of what still could be. I didn’t think her life would change or that she would ever break into some Martina McBride chart buster and walk away from Benny, but Jessica surely deserved the simple experience of being in a place where adults read, write, and calculate—where she could be the adult mom in a small comp class of eighteen-year-olds who wants to be there and makes it worth the teacher’s time, as virtually all her instructors had told her she could be. Every week she would write her one-page compositions and have me check the spelling before typing them on her antiquated desktop computer—the most memorable for me was an argument paper against a proposed state lottery, based on her experience as a new mother whose husband would insist they end their pressure-washing workweek by driving to the state line and spending all their diaper and rent money on the lottery tickets he was convinced were one number from making them rich. Her husband was not bad at math, he’d told her, and he’d figured the odds.
JESSICA’S PARENTS, who often leaned on her for help, were the least supportive of all when it came to any post-GED education: I doubted this when she told me, until the day her father looked up from working on a car in the driveway and told her she was “gettin’ above your raising”—a phrase I’d only ever heard used as a joke. I didn’t think real people still said it. He said he couldn’t understand the words she used anymore. When she was in grade school, the teachers were still trying to make kids lose their Appalachian accents, and she’d had speech therapy galore. That seemed to have made no difference, luckily, but now six weeks of community college had her speaking to her family like a Hogwarts professor? I didn’t think so.
Jessica had a genuine hunger to learn and, like everyone, needed to be listened to by someone who cared about her opinions—yet the peremptory wishes of men quickly overrode her instincts. She would devour any book: her class reading of Into the Wild, an account of the fatal adventure of a young survivalist in Alaska; the boys’ hardcover library copies of Harry Potters, which she would finish in a night; the Lee Smith novels I passed along; Fried Green Tomatoes, The Color Purple, and The Glass Castle; and the cover-stripped romance novels she found in the dump’s Swap Shop shed. She often spoke of loving to read and told the boys how important it was, even though Ryan could go for weeks without a signature on his school reading log.
More puzzling was that when Michael was in primary school years later, long after Jessica’s community college dream had folded, she began doing his homework for him. He did have a lot of it, and he struggled with handwriting, so initially Jessica would take his dictation, writing down words or math numbers in big, looping, girl-cute printing, then have him trace over it in faltering pencil. This in itself was not always a bad thing, but she soon was literally doing the homework for him, not even with him, even when he wanted to do it on his own, he’d tell me; often the work he turned in contained mistakes he would not have made himself. He didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, Michael said. The homework pages became almost a weird game of keep-away, with me trying to have him do it in my car or with me rather than taking it home. “Please tell Michael he has to do it himself,” I would beg his new and astonished teacher, whispering so Michael wouldn’t hear me and repeat it.
To this day, I am guilty of helping him with homework too much myself, always with the intention of keeping him on track once the afternoon spells of attention deficit and hyperactivity kick in full force; I prod him to do a better job, write in complete sentences, restate questions, show his work, find the evidence, and I simply try to get him to think. Or, as many parents of children with these problems may recognize, to keep him from spending all his energy on studying for the test he already took or writing a paragraph that addresses something entirely different from the narrowly prescribed topic—I was well aware that he would burn the house down before he’d redo it. So I don’t have much standing to admonish anyone for helping with homework, although I also know Michael would not do it if I didn’t at least try to corral him and keep him on track.
As frustrated as I was, and as hard as it became to get Michael to do the barrage of elementary homework, or even to hold a pencil instead of snapping it, I felt sure, I told the teacher, that his mom was just entirely bored and sad that she had never gotten to finish high school herself. I was sure, I said, that she found these small daily challenges as satisfying as others might find guessing Wheel of Fortune phrases or doing crossword puzzles. Jessica might have been pulled from high school by her parents and from community college by her boyfriend’s jealousy—but she could still do these simple assignments while feeling like a good parent who was helping her child get to a better life than she’d had. Even when Benny’s teenage son lived with them, she took copious notes from his math book on his behalf—notes that she longed to explain to him and that I doubt he even looked at. For once, I thought, I could understand exactly what she felt.
“I expect you to go to college,” she’d say to Ryan and Michael, and simply saying it means something, even without a clear path to reach it, and even if the person saying it puts up one obstacle after the next. Needles and pins.
AS MUCH as I wanted to do some tangible good, my reasons for helping the family in practical ways were selfish. In addition to my being able to keep Michael on alternate weekends, I was elated that I could spend time with him and his brother while their mother was in classes, or we were all driving back and forth; soon Jessica incorporated me in the boys’ many medical appointments, which gradually became entirely my responsibility. I bought her a cell phone and calling plan in the hope the boys would call to escape Benny’s rages—and so I’d always have a way to call and make arrangements to see Michael; this also meant replacing a series of phones the enraged Benny broke to cut them off from me or other help, events that Jessica explained away as “accidentally dropping the phone in the toilet” or in a glass of water—an excuse designed to forestall questions.
At least I never bought the endless cigarettes, but every year I wondered if the kids’ Christmas money did. It was always clear to Michael that the first and last of all money always went to cigarettes. Indeed, the price of cigarettes seems to be a constant unit of measurement in foster parents’ complaints—and even from the children’s grandmother, who is a heavy smoker herself but said she never bought cigarettes until the week’s food was in the house. For foster parents, every basic item or experience the birth parents fail to provide is always expressed in terms of something the children could have had: for the price of a pack of Camels, that child could have had at least thrift store sneakers, gone to a school dance, had spare underwear to keep for accidents at school. It was the measure I heard most often—and used myself.
JESSICA AND I kept up a friendly and warily trusting relationship for several years, though, by talking about books and the pride we shared in her children. The first time she sent the boys to stay for an extended time with Will and me was just before Halloween, two years after they’d gone home and halfway through her first community college semester, before and after the surgery that went wrong. The feverish infection and complications that followed seemed likely because she was on Medicaid at that time and the surgery was the last low-reimbursement one the surgeon performed before heading to a Caribbean cruise. Initially, the boys were to stay with us for just two weeks, but this stretched through Christmas Eve, and then again after. I was glad that Jessica was getting some rest and help for her pain before her Medicaid coverage ran out, and I was thrilled to have the boys with us for that much time, even though it meant driving them from one county to the next for elementary and preschool each weekday. Gas and road hours seemed like no price at all to pay, and it was a relief to get to pick matching clothes and smell hair that was clean and smoke-free. The hours on the road meant all the more opportunity to play hand-me-down purple cassette tapes of nursery rhymes and folk songs, pumping in those essential memories and rhythms, vocabulary, and classic images they needed
