In any case, by the first of May she and the two boys had moved out of the house as Jessie said they would—they had rented the downstairs apartment in the old Fenner place on Hawthorne Street at the west edge of town—and it was Doyle Francis who helped them move. They used his pickup. Jessie accepted that much assistance from him at least, although afterward she sent him a freshly baked chocolate cake on a platter, to square things, to keep that balance sheet of hers in the black.
Well, it was a nice enough apartment: they had five rooms—a kitchen, a living room, two small bedrooms, and there was a bathroom with a shower off the kitchen. They also had use of the front porch, a wide old-style porch with a wooden rail around it and with a swing suspended from hooks in the ceiling. From the porch, they could look west diagonally across the street toward open country since that was where Holt ended then, at Hawthorne Street: there was just Harry Smith’s pasture west of them, a half-section of native grass in which Harry kept some horses. So it was a good place for her boys to grow up; they would have all that open space available to them across the street.
When they had settled in and after new curtains had been hung over the windows—heavier ones to block any view from the street—Jessie began to take care of the money end of it as well. She began to earn a living. She took a job at the Holt Cafe on Main Street. Six days a week she worked as a waitress, rising each morning to feed TJ and Bobby and to play with them until just before noon when the sitter, an old neighbor lady—Mrs. Nyla Waters, a kindly woman, a widow—came to watch the boys while Jessie worked through the noon rush and the afternoon and the dinner hour, and then returned again each evening about seven o’clock to bathe and put the boys to bed and to read them stories. She often sang to them a little too, before they slept.
And working in this way—being pregnant and having to spend that many hours away from her children—was not the optimum solution to all her problems either, of course, but she didn’t have many alternatives. She refused to consider welfare. Accepting Aid to Dependent Children, or even food stamps, was not a part of her schedule of payments—that local balance sheet of hers, I mean—since any public assistance of this kind came from taxes. A portion of that public tax money would have originated, at least theoretically, in Holt County. She knew that. And she didn’t want anything from people in Holt. Not if she hadn’t paid for it, she didn’t. Doyle Francis was right about that.
But then, toward the end of spring that year, she discovered a way to make the final payment. She began to go out dancing at the Holt Legion on Saturday nights.