"Mom, I'm old enough to get a job and help out now."
"Honey, you're thirteen."
"I know, but I could babysit or mow lawns, right?"
"No. You don't need to do that. We'll find a way to get by. We always do, don't we?"
Her daughter, Kayleigh, was a teenager, but not a typical teen girl. She never complained. Ever. She wore things until they wore out. She ate whatever her mom could afford to put on her plate. She never asked for anything even when that meant missing out on a field trip or something education-related. She'd even learned not to care about comments from other girls about her outdated clothes or that she never wore makeup, a luxury too expensive to even think of asking for.
Several girls, one of them a former best friend whose parents had money, were the ones who went out of their way to make Kayleigh's life miserable. Most were neutral or didn't care, but when even a handful of the most popular girls ostracize you, it's painful no matter how hard you try and ignore them. Her mom knew that, and it hurt her deeply, too, knowing how cruel girls could be.
Boys were a different matter, and part of the reason her former friend and her new 'posse' never gave Kayleigh a break. Being poor, she didn't have nice clothes, but the one thing she had was her mother's genes. Kayleigh Sanders was pretty, and it didn't matter what she wore. The boys knew it, too, and treated her accordingly, and that infuriated the little click of girls who resented her for it and saw her as competition.
Kayleigh believed her mother who often reminded her that school, and especially junior high, was a make-believe world that often bore little resemblance to real life. It was a training ground of sorts; the place where young people learned to become adults as they tested the waters, pushed boundaries, and charted their future course. As that process unfolded, a lot of...stuff...happened, and according to her mom, a lot of it could be very painful.
So Kayleigh held on to the hope that things would one day change for the better while doing her best to be the kind of daughter her late father would want her to be; a friend to her mother who really was her best friend, and a pleasant, cheerful human being who did her best to actually learn something at school in spite of the 'stuff' that went on in her life every day she was there.
Since her father's untimely death, her mom's experience was the same only without the kind of grief that 'mean girls' dished out. She never splurged. She never did anything for herself. The bills came first, then any money leftover—which was extremely rare—went to to take care of her daughter's needs. But now they were struggling more than ever, and unless she could find a way to stay afloat, they risked losing their home.
Vanessa Sanders had been widowed for nearly two years, and through it all, she'd done her best to never complain, her example not lost on her daughter. Her late husband, Adam, was a Seattle firefighter who'd responded to a three-alarm blaze just shy of twenty-four months ago.
An apartment complex had been set on fire by an arsonist, and by the time the first trucks arrived people were streaming out of the building. Many were screaming at the firefighters to find their loved ones they'd lost track of in the ensuing chaos.
Adam made a total of four separate trips inside while other firefighters poured as much water onto the blaze as they could. He'd found an elderly man overcome with smoke inhalation the first time, and a small child the second. Both made full recoveries, facts Adam Sanders would never know. The third time he didn't find any people, but he did carry out a dog that had been cowering in a corner.
A woman who was screaming hysterically begged him to go back in.
"My baby! My baby!" she kept screaming.
"Where? Which floor? Which room?" he asked even as his battalion chief told him not to to go back in.
He shook his head and said, "Sorry, Chief. I have a daughter at home. I'd want to know they made every effort to save her. If there's even a chance there's a child inside, I have to go back in."
Short of asking one of the police officers helping to control the crowd to restrain him, the chief knew it was a losing battle. He told Adam to be careful and to get in and out as quickly as possible. He redirected every hose to the part of the building Adam was headed into, but within twenty seconds of his entering the building, most of the second floor came down. Moments later, much of the third collapsed on top of it leaving a huge, gaping hole in that section of the building.
Many hours later, once the fire was out and the rubble could be cleared, Adam's lifeless body was found under a huge concrete slab, but there was no child inside. The little girl had just gotten separated from her mother and was fine, but Adam Sanders had given his life trying to find her.
The chief and the mayor both told Vanessa Adam was a hero at his memorial where they posthumously presented her with the highest award the city could bestow on a first responder. They said the same thing to her then-eleven-year daughter, Kayleigh. Too young to understand, she'd withdrawn inside herself for the next year. She got up, went to school, and made it through each day, but only in the last six months or so had she begun to return to being her old self. And that was around the same time the ridicule and the criticism began as her clothes no longer fit.
Her mother had grieved in her own, very different way, but it had been just as difficult for her. She'd been unable to work at all for nearly six months, and even when she was finally able to find a job, it wasn't enough to pay their bills. She and her daughter had been able get by reasonably well for for the first year or so by using most of the $50,000 of life insurance Adam had on himself. But with a mortgage that ate up just over $1,800 a month plus property taxes and repairs on top of all their other bills, that money was completely gone as of six months ago.
Making matters worse, Kayleigh had had a growth spurt, making her shirts too tight and pants too short. She was still unable to wear her mom's things, and as a result, she was forced to go to school wearing whatever her mom could find at yard sales.
In addition, past-due notices were piling up, and Vanessa was 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' each month by making partial payments or skipping one bill to pay another as she tried to make ends meet. At wits ends, one of the guys from Adam's battalion who still checked in on her once a week or so told her about something he'd recently heard of called 'Va-Cay Stations'.
"What is it?" Vanessa asked him during a recent short visit.
"It's an online site that's kind of like Uber for your house. You can rent out a room or rooms in your home to people either long-term or for a day or two at a time. The amount of money people pay is about the same as they'd pay for an average motel in the area. Plenty of people prefer living in a home to a motel, and it's really catching on. I was thinking you might want to give a try. You know, to maybe help get you through this rough patch."
Rough patch. That was a very kind way of saying 'unmitigated financial disaster.' This friend, who was named Jack, had been one of Adam's best friends and more than caring since her husband's death, so Vanessa wasn't about to mention how much of an understatement that was. There was a 'delta' of close to $1,000 a month between what she earned and what she needed just to break even so even a second, full-time job wouldn't make up the difference. And with a 13-year old daughter to raise, working two jobs was a recipe for a visit from child services.
Vanessa had no family in the local area so there just wasn't anyone she could turn to for help. Her mother lived alone down in southern Oregon, and she was surviving on social security, so that was also a financial dead end.
Recently, Vanessa was seriously thinking about selling their house or even filing for bankruptcy. And then what? If she sold their place, she'd have to buy another one, and since she couldn't pay cash, she'd still have a mortgage. Yes, it would be smaller, and that would help, but she saw no way to earn enough to make that happen without moving to someplace far less expensive, and that meant moving a long way from everything she and her daughter knew and loved.
