In April, Vanetta hid candy Easter eggs around the Lodge for her children to find. Kendal let Tembi and Bo-Bo collect them. Sometimes, the boy already seemed finished with childhood. At four years old, he refused to hold Vanetta’s hand and didn’t like singing in his preschool class. A handsome boy, with pinched lips and espresso-colored eyes, he intuited that his momma had enough to worry about. This, of course, made Vanetta worry.
A few days before Easter, Tembi pulled the fire alarm. When management found out who was responsible, they told Vanetta she had to be out the next day. Vanetta didn’t waste much time protesting. She headed straight for the heart of the ghetto and began calling on apartments. She called on every rent sign she saw, regardless of the condition of the house or the neighborhood. She toured a dirty apartment with cracks down the walls and grease on the ceiling on a block with abandoned homes and gang graffiti. She hated it and filled out an application.
“Girl, you got put out because of yo’ kids?” Crystal asked. That cold night on the porch, Crystal had finally gotten ahold of a cousin, who allowed her to spend the night. After that, Crystal began sleeping in the waiting room of Wheaton Franciscan, which she called “St. Joseph’s Hospital,” and the newly remodeled Amtrak station, downtown, where she tried blending in with waiting passengers. One day at a bus stop, she met a woman named Patricia. They were roommates by day’s end. Crystal needed a place to stay, and Patricia, who had been plotting to toss her abusive husband, needed an income to replace his. Patricia was twice Crystal’s age, with a teenage daughter and a single-family home in one of the quieter sections of the North Side. Crystal began calling Patricia “Mom.”1
The next day, Vanetta checked out of the Lodge and took her things to her older sister’s apartment. Ebony lived on Orchard Street, a residential street near the Hispanic Mission, in a small three-bedroom upper with her husband, three kids, and Vanetta’s younger sister. The place was cluttered and worn, with a stained beige carpet, mattresses in almost every room, and a small kitchen tucked in the back. Vanetta wasn’t planning on staying long. She gave her sister $50, moved her kids into one of the small bedrooms, and headed downtown to the courthouse for D’Sean’s re-confinement hearing.
D’Sean was Bo-Bo’s father, and Vanetta thought she loved him. He was a good dad when he wasn’t drinking. The police had picked him up six months earlier for a parole violation linked to a drug-possession charge. As the judge weighed the facts of the case, he cited several 911 calls Vanetta had made when D’Sean got rough. “And then on October 10, a call from Vanetta Evans. And then on October 19, another call from Ms. Evans.” Mortified, Vanetta put her hands in her face and cried. She remembered those calls and what had happened after she kicked D’Sean out. He returned later, drunk, smashed the door down, and beat her. After that incident, Vanetta remembered the landlord taking her rent money with one hand and handing her a twenty-eight-day “no cause” eviction notice with the other. At the re-confinement hearing, the judge gave D’Sean eighteen months. Vanetta almost never drank, but that night she bought a bottle of New Amsterdam gin and passed out next to her children.
She slept through Crystal’s phone call. So Crystal hung up and dialed her cousins and foster sisters. Her arrangement with Patricia had come undone. Patricia’s fourteen-year-old daughter had taken Crystal’s cell phone to school and either lost or sold it. Crystal demanded compensation, but Patricia refused to pay. “I’m gonna get you out of my house!” Patricia yelled, drunk on wine mixed with E&J Brandy. Crystal called her people for backup. They waited in the car. The women took their argument outside, and Patricia lost her balance and fell to the ground. Staring down, Crystal lifted her foot and brought it down on Patricia’s face—again and again. Seeing this, one of Crystal’s sisters ran up and hit Patricia with a hammer. “Bitch, try it again!” she yelled before pulling Crystal away. In pain, Patricia lay still on the sidewalk, in a fetal position. Crystal asked to be dropped off at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she spent the night.2
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After trying for seventy-three places, Vanetta and Crystal were approved for a $500-a-month two-bedroom apartment. Desperate tenants willing to overlook neglected repairs had found a desperate landlord willing to overlook evictions and convictions. The apartment’s wood floors were sticky with grime, the front door didn’t lock properly, and the bedrooms were so small they couldn’t hold much more than a twin bed. In the kitchen, the sink was clogged, the floor tiles were chipped, and there was a wall of cabinets sealed shut with laminating paper. There were empty spaces where a stove and refrigerator once had been. There was, however, a tub. And the place was on Seventh and Maple, on the near South Side: you could see St. Stanislaus’s twinned steeples from the kitchen window. Vanetta thought it was a dangerous block. She had known the drug dealer on the corner since childhood. “It’s wretched, but I’m tired of looking,” Vanetta said. “I don’t want to take it…but it’s the only option I got.”
The new friends moved into the apartment with a few garbage bags of clothes and toys between them. Crystal had left most of her things at Patricia’s and considered them gone for good. The only piece of furniture in the place was an old upholstered rocking chair someone had left behind.
Vanetta and Crystal’s plan was to stay for a year. But not long after moving in, Clara, a woman Crystal and Vanetta knew from the Lodge, came over and used up Crystal’s cell-phone minutes. So Crystal put her through one of the apartment’s windows. When the cops showed up, Crystal made herself a couple of sandwiches for the road. Vanetta used most of what she had saved at the shelter to pay for the shattered window—and told Crystal not to come back. It was the only way the landlord would allow Vanetta and her children to stay.
A few days later, Child Protective Services called Ebony’s apartment, asking for Vanetta.3 When Ebony called Vanetta to warn her, Vanetta suspected Crystal. “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” she vented to Shortcake. “Do you know that bitch called social services on me!”
“You poured salt on her. Now she’s gonna pour salt on you,” Shortcake said.
“She pouring salt on my kids!” Vanetta cried.
The news about CPS had unnerved Vanetta. She didn’t think they would allow her children to stay in an apartment with no stove or refrigerator. Vanetta was broke, but she went to a used-appliances corner store anyway. Spanish music played over a clutter of used dishwashers, dryers, and other appliances. The owner, Mr. Rodriguez, a pudgy Mexican man with thick hair, identified different units piled in his small store with a stick resembling a teacher’s pointer.
“How much is your cheapest stove and cheapest refrigerator?” Vanetta asked.
“Baking? No baking?” Rodriguez asked with a thick accent.
Vanetta shook her head no. She would be fine with a nonworking oven.
Rodriguez poked his stick in the direction of a small gas stove.
“How much?” Vanetta asked.
“Ninety.”
She shook her head no again. “Too high. How much?”
Rodriguez shrugged.
They went back and forth until Vanetta talked Rodriguez down to $80 including the hose piece, which he had wanted to sell separately. She found a refrigerator somewhere else and talked the guy down to $60. She borrowed the money from a friend, promising to pay it back the first of the month, and finished the day shopping at Aldi. At the checkout counter, she placed the ice-cream sandwiches and other junk food at the end of the conveyor belt in case she ran out of food stamps and needed to put something back.