Kitty's Saga Chapter Two: A Start to a Start

It was eight o’clock in the evening when Kitty called Sandy Brown’s home number to schedule a job interview. Mrs. Brown had been half asleep when she answered the phone, and beneath Kitty’s otherwise polite manner, Sandy detected a touch of desperation.

Sandy ended the call by penciling Kitty in for an interview the following Friday, deliberately putting her at the end of the line behind candidates who had actual in-home care experience and certifications. Secretly, Sandy hoped Kitty would either give up or find another job before then.

On the other end of the call, however, Kitty practically jumped for joy. She saw the interview as her chance to have both a new place to live and some kind of income. As far as Kitty was concerned, things were finally looking up.

She felt so optimistic that she immediately began packing her meager belongings into a few empty grocery bags.

In Kitty’s mind, she already had the job.

The next few days passed painfully slowly. Kitty counted down the hours until her interview, and every class she attended seemed increasingly pointless. The few people at school she was friendly with asked about her audition, but Kitty frowned whenever anyone mentioned it. She had far more pressing concerns.

Namely, her social worker.

Kitty knew it was only a matter of time before her social worker appeared at school or came looking for her at home. Once word got out that Pam had been incarcerated, there would be questions.

Pam had been the barely acceptable placeholder Kitty had begrudgingly come to regard as her guardian. Kitty was simultaneously relieved and horrified that she was gone.

Because Pam was over eighteen, she had been able to collect the food assistance and housing benefits that helped support them. Kitty, still a minor, had depended on Pam’s guardianship to access what little stability those benefits provided. Unfortunately, Pam often found ways to misuse the money, leaving Kitty hungry and frustrated while she chased her next fix.

Pam had also made it nearly impossible for Kitty to find legitimate employment on her own. She frequently withheld Kitty’s Social Security card and other documents, all while presenting herself to outsiders as a devoted guardian.

“I’m all my little sister has in this world,” Pam liked to say.

Kitty had a very different opinion of their arrangement.

By the end of another school day, she had come to terms with what she believed she needed to do. She was going to drop out and find full-time work. All she had to do was survive the few remaining weeks until her birthday, when she would finally be old enough to make more decisions for herself.

As grim as it might have sounded to someone else, Kitty didn’t find the thought particularly depressing. In her mind, a high school diploma wasn’t going to rescue her from a lifetime of minimum-wage work anyway. Freedom mattered more. She wanted to be out from under Pam’s thumb and beyond the reach of the foster-care system.

College and the finer things in life belonged to some distant world inhabited by other people. Kitty could imagine them, but she couldn’t imagine them for herself. They might as well have existed on another planet.

Oddly enough, accepting that made her feel optimistic.

That afternoon, Kitty returned to her tiny studio and noticed something she had rarely appreciated before: sunlight.

For once, there was no heavy cloud of Pam’s cigarette smoke hanging in the air and obscuring the light coming through the window.

Kitty knew she had to move out as soon as possible. She knew her situation was precarious.

But for that one afternoon, she allowed herself a small victory.

She was home.

And Pam wasn’t.

Meanwhile, Sandy had problems of her own.

The interviews were going far worse than she had hoped, largely because Sandy didn’t actually have the money to pay anyone she hired.

Money had once represented stability in her life. Now, after cancer treatment followed by a stroke, hospital bill after hospital bill had consumed nearly everything she had. Her savings were gone.

Realistically, the only compensation Sandy could offer a live-in aide was a free room and meals.

To Sandy, this seemed like a reasonable arrangement. She was still mostly independent, after all. She simply needed another person in the house so that if she had a seizure or another medical emergency, someone would be there to call for help.

Or at least, that was how Sandy described the position.

In practice, she expected her boarder to remain home as much as possible, help her move around the house, and take care of assorted household chores as they arose.

Sandy had assumed that at least one applicant would find the arrangement worthwhile.

Instead, her proposition was met with outright hostility.

One young man became so angry when Sandy explained the terms that he stood up and announced that he was going to call the police and report her for “attempted slavery.”

After that, Sandy canceled the remaining interviews.

She concluded that young people simply had very different expectations about work than her generation had.

Unfortunately, she had forgotten about Kitty.

By the time Friday arrived, Kitty had almost exhausted her emergency cash. Her naturally nervous disposition had escalated into nearly constant anxiety.

Then there were the missed calls from her social worker.

Every time the phone rang, it seemed louder than the time before.

Kitty had stopped attending school altogether because she was terrified that her social worker would pull her out of class and return her to the group home. Staying in the apartment during the day made her equally uneasy. Every sound outside the door made her wonder whether someone had finally come looking for her.

So Kitty pinned everything on her interview with Sandy.

On the morning of the interview, she dressed carefully. She wore one of Pam’s shoplifted ruffled blouses with an old pair of jeans she had hand-washed with dish soap in the kitchen sink the night before.

Then she began the long journey to Sandy’s house.

It took two hours and three bus transfers.

When Kitty finally arrived in Sandy’s neighborhood, she was in awe.

Sandy lived in a Victorian-style house surrounded by what had probably once been a meticulously maintained yard but had since become slightly overgrown. The neighborhood was nothing like the apartment complexes Kitty was accustomed to. Enormous oak trees lined the streets, the houses seemed impossibly grand, and even the sky somehow looked bluer.

Kitty nearly ruined everything by getting lost.

Her complete lack of direction led her six blocks the wrong way before she finally realized her mistake. By the time she found Sandy’s house, she was breathless, nervous, and perilously close to being late.

Inside, Sandy was sitting in her parlor when she heard a weak knock at the front door.

She might have ignored it entirely had she not noticed, through the stained-glass window, the silhouette of a young woman anxiously shifting from one foot to the other on her porch.

Sandy cautiously opened the door just far enough to see Kitty’s face.

“Hello?”

“I’m here for the job interview,” Kitty said. “Remember? We talked on the phone.”

Sandy didn’t remember the conversation particularly well. Her grandson had posted a flier near his dorm, and she had received a string of calls about it.

“Of course,” Sandy said. “Please, come in.”

She opened the door.

If nothing else, Sandy decided, the sickly thin young woman standing before her hardly seemed threatening. Whether Kitty was actually an applicant or merely a confused passerby, Sandy doubted she posed much danger.

Sandy gestured toward a chair.

“Have a seat.”

“You have a great home,” Kitty said awkwardly.

“Oh, yes,” Sandy replied. “It’s about all I have anymore.”

Then came the part Sandy had grown to dread.

“You see, there was a mistake on the flier. My grandson wrote that the position pays well. The truth is that it doesn’t pay anything. You would be compensated with room and board, and that’s about it.”

As she finished speaking, Sandy began to rise from her chair. She had already prepared herself for the indignation that had followed every previous explanation.

But Kitty didn’t move.

Sandy glanced back.

The girl was still planted firmly in her chair.

Then Kitty smiled.

“That’s great,” she said cheerfully. “How soon can I start?”