Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

My jaw feels too tight. “Is this why you had me over here?” I ask. “To tell me you can’t be associated with me anymore?”

What had I been stupid enough to think? That this was a social visit? That for the first time in a decade Christina had suddenly decided she wanted me to drop in for lunch? Or had I known all along that if I came here, it was because I was hoping for a miracle in the form of the Hallowells-even if I was too proud to admit it?

For a long moment, we just stare at each other. “No,” Christina says. “I needed to see you with my own eyes. I wanted to make sure you were…you know…all right.”

Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.

“Well, you can check this off your good deed list,” I say bitterly. “I’m doing just fine.”

“Ruth-”

I hold up my hand. “Don’t, Christina, okay? Just…don’t.”

I try to feel through the chain of our history for the snag, the mend in the links, where we went from being two girls who knew everything about each other-favorite ice cream flavor, favorite New Kids on the Block member, celebrity crush-to two women who knew nothing about how the other lived. Had we drifted apart, or had our closeness been the ruse? Was our familiarity due to friendship, or geography?

“I’m sorry,” Christina says, her voice tiny.

“I am too,” I whisper.

Suddenly she bolts from the table and comes back a moment later, emptying the contents of her bag. Sunglasses and keys and lipsticks and receipts scatter the surface of the table; Advil tablets, loose in the bottom of her bag, spill like candy. She opens her wallet and takes a thick wad of bills and presses it into my hand. “Take this,” Christina says. “Just between the two of us.”

When our hands brush, there’s an electric shock. I jump up, as if it were a bolt of lightning. “No,” I say, backing away. This is a line, and if I cross it, everything changes between Christina and me. Maybe we have never been equals, but at least I’ve been able to pretend. If I take this money, I can’t go on fooling myself.

“I can’t.”

Christina is fierce, folding my fingers around the money. “Just do it,” she says. Then she looks up at me as if all is well in the world, as if nothing has changed, as if I have not just become a beggar at her feet, a charity, a cause. “There’s dessert,” Christina says. “Rosa?”

I trip over my chair in my hurry to escape. “I’m not really very hungry.” I avert my glance. “I have to go.”

I grab my coat and my purse from the rack in the foyer and hurry out the door, closing it tight behind me. I push the elevator button over and over, as if that might make it come faster.

And I count the bills. Five hundred and fifty-six dollars.

The elevator dings.

I hurry toward the welcome mat outside Christina’s door and slip all the money beneath it.

This morning I told Edison we couldn’t drive the car anymore. The registration has expired and I can’t afford to renew it. Selling it will be my last resort, but in the meantime, while I try to save enough to cover the state and federal fees and the gas, we will take the bus.

I get into the elevator and close my eyes until I reach ground level. I run down Central Park West until I cannot catch my breath, until I know I will not change my mind.

–

THE BUILDING ON Humphrey Street looks like any other government building: a square, cement, bureaucratic block. The welfare office is packed, every cracked plastic seat filled with someone who is bent over a clipboard. Adisa walks me up to the counter. She’s working now-making minimum wage as a part-time cashier-but she’s been in and out of this office a half dozen times when she was between jobs, and knows the ropes. “My sister needs to apply for assistance,” she announces, as if that statement doesn’t make me die a little inside.

The secretary looks to be Edison’s age. She has long, swinging earrings shaped like tacos. “Fill this out,” she says, and she hands me a clipboard with an application.

Since there is nowhere to sit, we lean against the wall. While Adisa searches for a pen in her cavernous shoulder bag, I glance at the women balancing clipboards and toddlers on their knees, at the men who reek of booze and sweat, at a woman with a long gray braid who is holding a doll and singing to herself. About half the room is Caucasian-mothers wiping the noses of their children in wads of tissues, and nervous men in collared shirts who tap their pens against their legs as they read each line on the form. Adisa sees me glancing at them. “Two-thirds of welfare goes to white folks,” she says. “Go figure.”

I have never been so grateful for my sister.

I fill out the first few queries: name, address, number of dependents.

Income, I read.

I start to put down my annual salary, and then cross it out. “Write zero dollars,” Adisa says.

“I get a little bit from Wesley’s-”

“Write zero dollars,” Adisa repeats. “I know people who got rejected for SNAP because they had cars that were worth too much. You’re going to screw the system the way the system screwed you.”

When I don’t start writing, she takes the application, fills in the blanks, and returns it to the secretary.

An hour passes, and not a single person is called from the waiting room. “How long does this take?” I whisper to my sister.

“However long they feel like making you wait,” Adisa replies. “Half the reason these people can’t get a job is because they’re too busy sitting here waiting on benefits to go apply anywhere.”

It’s nearly three o’clock-four hours after we’ve arrived-before a caseworker comes to the door. “Ruby Jefferson?” she says.

I stand up. “Ruth?”

She glances at the paperwork. “Maybe,” she concedes.

Adisa and I follow her down a hallway to a cubicle and sit. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” she says in a monotone. “Are you still employed?”

“It’s complicated…I was suspended.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m a nurse, but my license has been put on hold until an impending lawsuit is over.” I say these words in a rush, like they are being purged from the core of me.

“It don’t matter,” Adisa says. “Imma break it down fuh you. She don’t got no job and she don’t got no money.” I stare at my sister; I had been hoping that maybe the caseworker and I could find some common ground, that she might recognize me not as a typical governmental assistance applicant but as someone middle-class who has gotten a bum deal. Adisa, on the other hand, has whipped out the Ebonics, pushing as far away from my tactic as possible.

The caseworker shoves her glasses up her nose. “What about your son’s college fund?”

“It’s a five twenty-nine,” I say. “You can only use it for education.”

“She need medical,” Adisa interrupts.

The woman glances at me. “What are you paying right now for COBRA?”

“Eleven hundred a month,” I answer, flushing. “But I won’t be able to afford that by next month.”

The woman nods, noncommittal. “Get rid of your COBRA payment. You qualify for Obamacare.”

“Oh, no, you don’t understand. I don’t want to get rid of my coverage; I want to just get temporary funding,” I explain. “That’s the health insurance that comes from the hospital. I’m going to get my job back eventually-”

Adisa rounds on me. “And in the meantime what if Edison breaks his leg?”

“Adisa-”

“You think you O. J. Simpson? You gonna get off and walk away? News flash, Ruth. You ain’t O.J. You fa sho ain’t Oprah. You ain’t Kerry Washington. They get passes from white people because they famous. You just another nigga who’s going down.”