I thought about my mother. You were always so dumb. The words played on a loop in my head. She hadn’t offered help. She hadn’t even offered sympathy. She’d blamed me. And I thought about my father. Thomas Caldwell had left when I was 12. That was the story. He’d packed a bag one night and driven away and never come back. My mother told us he was weak, selfish, that he’d abandoned his responsibilities just like the Richardson money had abandoned us. She never talked about him, and neither did we. It was like he’d never existed. But sometimes, late at night, I still wondered, where had he gone? Was he still alive? Did he ever think about me? I fell asleep sometime after 3 and dreamed of him driving through empty streets looking for something he couldn’t find.
The county assistance office was in a strip mall between a nail salon and a subway. The waiting room was packed, plastic chairs in rows, a number dispenser by the door, a television mounted in the corner playing daytime talk shows with the volume off. I took a number, 67. The sign above the reception window said they were currently serving number 43. I sat down and waited.
The people around me were all kinds. A young mother with a toddler on her lap. An elderly man reading a newspaper. A woman about my age dressed in what looked like her best interview outfit, filling out forms with intense concentration. We were all here for the same reason, more or less. We needed help. We’d ended up somewhere we never expected to be.
My number came up after 2 hours. The case worker at the window was a black woman with short gray hair and glasses, efficient and no nonsense. Her name plate said P. Hartley. Name Margaret Caldwell. I was married so some documents might have me as social security number. I recited it from memory. She typed it into her computer, her eyes on the screen. Then she stopped. Her fingers froze over the keyboard. She leaned forward, squinting at her monitor, then looked at me over the top of her glasses. Give me a moment, she said. She stood up and walked to a back office. I could see her through the glass partition talking to a supervisor, both of them looking at a computer screen. The supervisor picked up a phone.
I sat there, my heart starting to pound, wondering if I’d done something wrong. If there was a warrant out for me somehow, some debt Nathan had left in my name, some crime I didn’t know about. 20 minutes passed, then an hour. The supervisor came out and called my name. She led me to a private room, a small conference space with a table and four chairs, and asked me to wait. Someone would be with me shortly.
I waited. After another hour, the door opened. A man walked in. He was in his 60s, maybe, wearing a gray suit that probably cost more than 2 months of my last salary. He had white hair and a face like weathered leather, kind, but serious. He was carrying a briefcase.
“Miss Caldwell,” he said. “My name is George Whitmore. I’m an attorney.” I stood up, my chair scraping against the lenolium. “I don’t understand what’s going on.” He set his briefcase on the table and looked at me for a long moment. “Maldwell, I’ve been trying to find you for 3 years since your father passed.” I sat back down.
