My sister turned down my $5,300 van loan in the middle of her own showroom, with my six foster kids standing by the window, and said, “They’re a paycheck, Latrice, not collateral.” Eleven weeks later she was at my kitchen table begging over a lottery ticket, and she hadn’t even read whose name was on the back yet.
Our old van was a 2009 with 214,000 miles on it, and the transmission quit on the way to Amir’s speech therapy.
Six kids. Seven seats.
The county told me plain that if I couldn’t get all of them to school and to visits by the first of the month, two would have to go to another home.
The two youngest.
The ones who had only just stopped sleeping in their shoes.
So I went to Sheena.
My little sister had run the finance desk at a used lot in Macon for nine years, and every Thanksgiving she told me to come see her when I was ready.
I had $1,900 down and a fifteen-passenger with a cracked dash I already loved.
I brought all six because there was nobody to leave them with. Mama had just had her hip done.
Sheena took my paperwork into her glass office and shut the door.
Out on the lot a man in a fishing hat was honking the horn of every truck in the front row, one after the other.
Eleven minutes later she came out with my application folded in half and didn’t sit back down.
“I can’t put my name on this,” she said.
“It’s fifty-three hundred dollars, Sheena. I have never missed a payment in my life.”
“Your income is a foster check.” She said it LOUD enough that the service desk turned around. “The state pays you, what, FOUR THOUSAND a month to keep them? That’s not income. They’re a paycheck, Latrice, not collateral.”
Chiara was standing by the window holding Amir’s hand.
She’s fourteen. She heard every word.
The salesman, Farhan, got real interested in his clipboard.
I didn’t say a thing. I loaded the kids into the church’s loaner and drove home.
Mama called that night.
“She’s under a lot of pressure,” Gwendolyn said. “You know how she gets.”
I knew how she got. She’d been like that since the year she moved off for a training program and came back thinner and wouldn’t pick up her phone for a month.
Eleven weeks of borrowing the church van.
Every Friday I buy one ticket at the gas station on the way back from swim. Two dollars. My daddy did the same thing his whole life and never won more than forty.
That Friday Chiara asked to pick the numbers.
She used the birthdays of everybody in the house, then turned it over and signed the back in purple gel pen like it was a check.
“If it hits, it’s mine,” she said.
“If it hits, it’s all yours, baby,” I said.
It hit.
$2.4 million.
I read it four times on my phone in the school pickup line, and the woman behind me had to lean on her horn.
I told Mama. Mama told Sheena.
Sheena was on my porch by seven that night holding grocery-store roses with the price sticker still on them.
“I was out of line,” she said. “I had a bad week. I’m sorry, okay?”
I let her in because the little ones were watching from the stairs.
She hugged every kid. She called Amir “Andrew.”
Then she sat at my kitchen table and pulled a legal pad out of her purse.
“You need somebody who does this for a living,” she said. “Lump sum versus annuity, taxes, a trust. People like you get eaten alive.”
“People like me,” I said.
“You know what I mean. And with the placements, the state is going to want to know where every dollar goes.”
The placements.
She still couldn’t say their names.
Then the lottery office told me a ticket belongs to whoever signs it, and that Chiara was a minor, so the claim had to go through me and the county with her birth record attached.
Sheena went quiet for one whole day.
Then she went to work.
She called nine times in two days. She cried on my voicemail. She asked if a fourteen-year-old even understood money, and whether it was right for her to sit on that kind of number while her own aunt drove a car with a recall on it.
On Wednesday she showed up with the claim form already filled out, everything but the signatures, and her own name typed in as financial advisor to the guardian.
That’s where I lost it.
“THEY ARE NOT A PAYCHECK, SHEENA,” I said. “Not when I need a van and not when you want a cut.”
Chiara was in the doorway. Amir was right behind her.
Sheena looked at them, and her mouth did the thing it does when a customer says no.
“Fine,” she said. “Just let me check the form so the county doesn’t kick it back. Let me do one thing right.”
God help me, I let her.
Marina, our caseworker, had emailed a scan of Chiara’s original birth record that afternoon. It came out of the sealed file that followed her to us when she was nine.
I had never opened it. You don’t, with the sealed ones.
Sheena pulled it up on my laptop to copy the hospital and the date.
She read the date out loud.
Then she stopped reading.
“Where was she born?” she said.
“Somewhere up north,” Chiara said from the doorway. “Nobody ever told me.”
Sheena’s hand came off the trackpad.
Her finger went down the screen to the box marked mother and stayed there.
I leaned over her shoulder.
The name typed in that box was SHEENA M. EPPS.
My sister didn’t move her finger.
Behind me Chiara said, “Why are you looking at it like that?”
The box marked mother
Sheena answered her. That’s the part I still can’t get over. Not me. Her.
“Because that’s my name, sweetheart,” she said.
She said it in her desk voice. The one for a man whose credit just came back.
Then she took her finger off the screen and shut the lid of my laptop with two hands, slow, the way you close a box with something breakable in it.
Chiara didn’t move from the doorway. Amir had a hold of her hoodie string and was wrapping it around his finger.
The hospital on that record was in Dayton, Ohio. The date was March of 2012.
I knew that date. I didn’t have to do any math.
“Sheena,” I said.
She stood up and put the claim form back in her purse. She left the legal pad. I don’t think she knew she’d left it.
At the front door she stopped with her hand on the knob and didn’t turn around.
“Before you look at me like that,” she said, “ask Mama who drove me up there.”
Purple gel pens
The spring of 2012 Sheena was twenty-nine and working the teller line at a bank on Pio Nono.
She told us the bank was sending her to a training program in Dayton. Eight months. Mama drove her up in the Buick because Sheena’s car wouldn’t have made it past Chattanooga.
I was thirty-two and working nights. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Nobody in my family answers questions anyway. They tell you about the weather in the place you asked about.
When Sheena came back she was thin in the face and she slept at Mama’s for a month with her phone off. Then she got the job at the lot and she never talked about Dayton again. Not once.
Chiara came to me nine years later.
Her adoption had come apart. The family that raised her from a baby moved to Texas and left her in the system like a couch they couldn’t fit in the truck. I don’t say that in front of her.
When Marina brought her to my door, she had one duffel bag and a backpack. Marina handed me the file and said, “Your mother’s letter is in the front.”
I thought she meant a reference. Mama had written references for me before. I never read it. I had a nine-year-old on my porch who wouldn’t take her shoes off.
And from that first year, every birthday, a padded envelope came from Mama’s house with a pack of purple gel pens in it. For Chiara.
Only Chiara.
The other five got a card with ten dollars in it. Chiara got a card, ten dollars, and the pens. I asked Mama about it once and she said, “That child likes purple. Is that a crime now?”
It was after midnight before the house got quiet.
I sat down at the kitchen table where Sheena had been sitting and pulled her legal pad over.
The top sheet was full. Her handwriting is small and leans backwards. Lump sum, tax bracket, annuity over thirty years, a column of numbers that went down the whole page.
Next to “placement stipend” she’d written $4,000 and a question mark.
At the bottom, circled twice: 1% = $24,000/yr.
The tenth voicemail
Chiara was at the table before anybody else the next morning, which never happens.
She had her backpack on. She hadn’t touched the cereal.
“Is she my mother?” she said.
I poured her juice because I needed something to do with my hands. Twenty years of fostering and I have never known how to answer that question for any child. You don’t get to practice it.
“Her name’s on the paper,” I said. “That’s all I know for sure. I didn’t know it yesterday morning. I swear to God, baby, I didn’t.”
“Did Grandma know?”
“I’m going to find out.”
She nodded like I’d told her the bus was late. Then she ate one spoonful and dumped the rest in the sink.
I called Mama from the car after drop-off. She picked up on the second ring, which meant she’d been sitting with the phone in her lap.
“Mama, Dayton.”
There was a long breath on the line.
“Not on the phone, Latrice,” she said. “I’m not doing this on the phone.”
“Then when?”
“When my hip lets me sit up straight.”
And she hung up on me. My mother has hung up on me twice in my life, and both times it was about Sheena.
Sheena started calling again that afternoon.
Number ten came while I was at Amir’s speech therapy in the church van. I let it go. I listened to it in the parking lot with the engine running.
She wasn’t crying on this one. She sounded like she was reading off a screen.
“Latrice, I’ve been thinking about this all night, and legally I’m still her blood. That has to count for something with the county. I’m not trying to take anything from you. I’m saying she has family that can actually handle this kind of money. Call me back.”
That night Amir showed me how to save voicemails off my phone onto the laptop. He’s twelve and he does it for the church ladies for a dollar a phone. He charged me nothing and made me say “save” out loud each time so I’d learn.
I saved all ten.
When we were done he said Chiara was up on the roof outside her window again. She goes out there when she’s thinking.
I climbed out after her in my house shoes, which at forty-six is a decision.
She was sitting with her knees up, holding her phone. She’d heard the voicemail. I’d played it on speaker without thinking, and she’d been in the back seat with her earbuds out.
“She said blood,” Chiara said. “She didn’t say my name one time.”
Then she looked at me.
“Does she want me or the ticket?”
Marina’s Monday call
Marina Rivera has been our caseworker for four years. She’s thirty-eight and she drives a Corolla with a car seat in the back for kids who aren’t hers. She doesn’t call. She emails. When she calls, you sit down.
She called Monday at 8:15.
“Latrice, I need you to hear this from me before you hear it from anybody else,” she said. “A relative filed a request on Friday to be assessed for kinship placement. For Chiara.”
“Sheena.”
“I can’t tell you who.”
“Marina.”
“Maternal aunt,” she said. “That’s what’s on the form. Maternal aunt.”
She didn’t write birth mother. Of course she didn’t. A woman who signs a surrender gives up her rights, and Sheena works with contracts every day of her life. She knew exactly which box to check.
And here is how it works in Georgia, because I’ve lived in it for twenty years. Family comes first. If a blood relative steps up and passes the home study, the county is supposed to look hard at placing the child with them. That’s a good rule. I’ve seen it save kids.
I never thought I’d see it pointed at one of mine.
“While that request is open,” Marina said, “the county can’t co-sign the lottery claim. Anything with that much money attached, the agency attorney wants the placement settled first.”
“So the ticket just sits.”
“The ticket sits. Chiara sits.”
I did the only thing I could think of. I drove to the lottery office downtown with the ticket in a Ziploc bag in my bra and Chiara’s birth record printed out, and I asked to file it anyway, me as her guardian, today.
The woman at the window was nice about it. She typed a while. Then she turned her monitor a little toward me.
“There’s a hold on this from your county’s legal office,” she said. “Came through this morning. I can’t take it.”
It got worse on the way home.
Marina called back. She’d been on with her supervisor.
“Latrice, the request has a statement attached,” she said. “It says the aunt is concerned about the stability of your household. It mentions transportation. It says you were recently denied financing for a vehicle and you’re relying on a borrowed one.”
I pulled over in the Kroger lot.
My sister had turned down my van loan on her own showroom floor, in front of my kids, and now she’d written it down and handed it to the county as a reason I shouldn’t keep one of them.
“She’s the one who denied it,” I said.
“I know,” Marina said. “I believe you. But a statement is a statement, and I have to put it in the file.”
I sat in that parking lot until the church van’s gas light came on.
Then I turned it toward Mama’s.
Mama’s recliner
Mama lives on a street off Vineville in the house I grew up in. She’s seventy-one. Since the hip, she’s been living in the recliner in the front room with a walker parked beside it like a second chair.
I brought all six, because there was still nobody to leave them with.
The kids went straight to the back bedroom where Mama keeps the old TV. Chiara stopped in the hall. I told her to go on with the others, and she went, but she left the door open.
Mama had a manila folder on her lap. She’d had it ready. She didn’t make me ask.
“Before you start,” she said, “you need to read the second page. Not the first one. The second one.”
The first page was a copy of a surrender form from a hospital in Dayton. March 2012. Sheena’s signature at the bottom, and her printed name, SHEENA M. EPPS, in the same backwards lean that was all over that legal pad.
The second page was a letter on county letterhead. It was dated the fall Chiara came to me. It was addressed to Mrs. Gwendolyn Epps.
Per your written request of September 14, and with consent of the receiving family, the child has been placed in the licensed foster home of your daughter, Latrice Epps.
I read it twice. Then I looked up.
“Consent of the receiving family,” I said. “That was me. I said yes to a nine-year-old. I didn’t know I was saying yes to this.”
“When that family dropped her, the agency called me,” Mama said. “I’d left my name in that file when she was born. I told them, if this ever goes bad, you call her grandmother. Fourteen years ago I told them that.”
“Why not tell me?”
“Because you’d have told your sister.”
“And why not tell her?”
Mama looked at the TV room door.
“Because she’d already signed one paper on that child,” she said. “I wasn’t going to hand her a chance to sign another.”
“Then why’d you call her about the ticket?”
Mama’s face did something I’ve only seen at funerals.
“Because I thought money might be the one thing that would get her into a room with that girl,” she said. “I thought she’d see her face. I’m an old fool, Latrice. Say it.”
I didn’t say it.
I held up the folder.
“County office, Thursday at ten,” I said. “You’re bringing this.”
“I can’t do those steps.”
“Then I’ll carry you up them.”
Room 4
The county building has a room for family meetings with a round table, six chairs and a box of tissues nobody touches. Room 4. I’ve been in it maybe thirty times.
Marina sat at the top of the table with the file. Sheena sat across from me in a navy blazer with a folder of her own, tabs on every page.
Mama sat by the wall in her walker seat. I’d carried her up the last four steps. She weighs about what Chiara does.
Chiara was in the hall with Amir, because she asked to be. Her own interview with Marina had been Tuesday. She wouldn’t tell me what she said.
Sheena went first. She’d practiced.
“I want to say I’m here because I love that girl,” she said. “I know my sister and I have had our issues. But I have a stable income, I have a four-bedroom house in a good school district, I have a husband with a pension. Rex is fully on board. I can give Chiara things this household can’t. And frankly, with this kind of money coming in, she needs somebody who understands money. I do this for a living. My sister drives a church van.”
Marina wrote something down.
“I’m not saying Latrice doesn’t care,” Sheena said. “I’m saying caring isn’t a plan. I’m her family. Her real family. I think the county should take that seriously.”
Marina turned to me. “Latrice?”
I didn’t say anything. I pulled the top sheet off the legal pad out of my purse and slid it across the table to Marina with two fingers.
Marina read it. She read the bottom line. She looked at Sheena.
“That’s my handwriting,” Sheena said. “So what? I was running numbers. That’s what I do. Anybody would run numbers.”
“Placement stipend, four thousand, question mark,” Marina said.
“I was estimating.”
“One percent, twenty-four thousand a year, circled.”
“It’s a standard advisory fee. It’s below market, honestly. Latrice, tell her that’s below market.”
I set my phone on the table and played number ten.
Legally I’m still her blood. That has to count for something with the county.
Sheena talked over it before it finished.
“That’s out of context. I was upset. I’d just found out. Do you know what that’s like, to find out like that, in somebody’s kitchen, off a laptop? I didn’t even know she was alive in this state.”
Mama put the folder on the table. She had to lean way over the walker to do it, and nobody helped her because nobody moved.
Marina opened it to the second page.
Sheena read it upside down. I watched her read it. She’s fast at upside down. It’s her job.
She turned around in her chair.
“You put her in Latrice’s house,” she said to Mama. “Five years. You let me sit at Thanksgiving across from her for five years and you never said one word.”
“You never once asked me what happened to her,” Mama said. “Not once in fourteen years, Sheena.”
“Because I signed that so I wouldn’t have to think about it. That was the whole point. That was the deal.” Her voice went up. The service desk would have turned around. “And now she’s got two point four million dollars with my birthday in the numbers, and I’m the only one in this room who’s not supposed to get anything? I carried her. I carried her nine months in Ohio by myself. She owes me something. Somebody in this family owes me something.”
Nobody said anything.
Out in the hall, through the little window in the door, Chiara was standing up. She’d heard that. The door to Room 4 doesn’t close right. I’d known that for years.
Marina closed the folder.
“Mrs. Rafferty,” she said, “I’m going to recommend the assessment be closed. I’ll put the reasons in writing. Your statement about transportation will be in the file, along with your involvement in the loan decision you described. I’ll also note what was said in this room.”
“You can’t do that on one bad day.”
“I can recommend it,” Marina said. “That’s my job.”
Sheena picked up her folder with all the tabs. She looked at Mama, then at me, then at the door with Chiara on the other side of it.
She went out the other door. The one to the stairwell.
Afterward I signed the claim at that same round table, with Marina co-signing for the county. All of it goes into an account the court controls until Chiara turns eighteen. Not a dollar of it comes to my house. I asked for it that way. Marina said it would also look good in the file. I said I didn’t care how it looked.
When we came out into the hall, Chiara had Amir’s hand.
“She said my birthday was in the numbers,” Chiara said. “That’s not true. I used everybody in our house.”
Hassan at the credit union
Six weeks later, a Friday, I went back for a van.
Not to Sheena’s lot. The credit union on Forsyth Road, where a man named Hassan sat behind a desk with no glass around it and asked me how many kids.
“Six,” I said.
“Then you need fifteen seats,” he said, and he didn’t laugh.
The van was a 2016 with 90,000 miles on it. $5,300 financed, $1,900 down. I’d held on to that $1,900 through everything. Mama co-signed. She made me drive her down there and she signed with her walker parked against Hassan’s desk.
Sheena didn’t come to Thanksgiving. Mama set her plate anyway, and nobody touched it, and Mama cleared it herself after.
The kids waited by the front window while I signed. All six. Chiara was holding Amir’s hand.
Hassan patted his shirt pocket and then his desk drawer.
“I’ve got no pen that works,” he said.
Chiara let go of Amir, came over, and took a purple gel pen out of her hoodie pocket.
On the way home we stopped at the gas station after swim, the way we always do.
I put my two dollars on the counter.
Chiara slid in front of me. “My turn to pick,” she said.
If this one sat with you, pass it to somebody who has ever been told their family was a paycheck.
Family money disputes can reveal who’s really willing to show up – like in the story of a brother who answered a $5,000 request with “Not a bank”, an IOU for $83,400 scribbled on a dinner napkin, and a brother whose license number turned up on Mom’s pawned diamonds.
