She's not fond of it, exactly, but she doesn't protest. As soon as Iris is done with her she retreats back to Evelyn's side of the cart, now looking just slightly frazzled.

Well, fortunately they've made it to the front of the line. A bored-looking teenage cashier scans their purchases as Evelyn digs out her credit card. 

There's also a rather impressive display of rows and rows of colorfully-packaged candy and gum. Evelyn glances down to gauge if Deskyl is staring hopefully at it. Getting her one small treat seems entirely justified, given that she's just calmly put up with waiting in line for ten minutes in an increasingly loud and crowded Walmart (the after-school rush is now picking up in earnest, and Evelyn is not looking forward to the traffic on the way back.) 

She isn't staring at it at all. (She doesn't know what it is, actually.)

Huh. Even if she can't read the labels on the packaging, where in the world doesn't have candy? This child continues to be full of surprises. Evelyn will discreetly swipe a Kit Kat bar for her and add it to the pile, to give her in the car. Deskyl seems responsible enough not to be messy with chocolate in the backseat.

She pays and they can escape into the parking lot. Evelyn hands Deskyl the shopping bag of new clothes; a lot of kids in foster care are protective of their possessions, when so much else about their life is uncertain, and she wants it to be very clear to Deskyl that the clothes belong to her. 

She takes the bag without any particular reaction and heads for the car, just a little faster than Evelyn might find comfortable, relaxing a bit once they're out of the thick of the crowd.

Well, if she wants to be out of here as soon as possible, that's very understandable and Evelyn isn't carrying anything now except her purse and can hurry. (She doesn't bother to put the shopping cart back properly; someone will take it in the next ten seconds.)

Once Deskyl is settled in the backseat again, Evelyn offers her the chocolate bar, miming cronching on it in case it's not obvious to her that it's food.  

Hm, okay - yeah, that's tasty. She gives an approving chirp.

Evelyn switches on the radio to a pop music station for the drive. It's too awkward to sit in silence while they wait at endless red lights behind rows of station wagons, and it feels silly to chatter the entire time when Deskyl can't understand her. Sure, 'immersion' is supposed to be a good way to learn languages, but with most of her attention on the road, Evelyn isn't sure she can come up with anything to say. 

It's nearly 5 pm by the time they make it back to the house and she parks in the driveway. "Hungry?" she asks Deskyl, miming eating again. 

"Eh," she shrugs.

She won't bother with a snack, then, just a pick-me-up coffee for herself before she gets started on dinner. She settles Deskyl at the dining room table with some craft supplies; in addition to the blank paper for drawing and colored pencils, she has a box with colored construction paper, a set of felt pens including glittery ones, several packs of wildly varied colorful stickers, and some miscellaneous ribbons and bits of shiny cloth that can be cut out and glued on. 

She spends a couple minutes writing out her whole alphabet with room left blank for the local equivalents once she learn them, then takes her bag of clothes and heads upstairs, returning after a few minutes in different pants to go sit on the living room couch and, to all appearances, stare off into space doing nothing in particular.

…Huh. Apparently not into crafts, then. Evelyn…isn’t exactly surprised, for some reason, it fits with the hazy and incomplete picture of Deskyl she’s starting to form in her head. She really just cannot figure this kid out. 

She can’t see Deskyl from the counter beside the fridge, which is probably fine but she relocates her chopping board to the island where she has line of sight to the living room. Smiles over at Deskyl occasionally, not that Deskyl seems to be paying attention to her. 

Evelyn has noticed that Deskyl seems to maybe be avoiding animal products, though she’s not sure, it's not like they've had many meals together and Deskyl can't communicate her food likes and dislikes. She takes it into account, though; she makes pasta - elbows instead of spaghetti, which can be tricky to eat even for children with good fine motor skills - and meatballs, but sets the meatballs out in a dish separate from the tomato sauce, beside another dish of grated Parmesan cheese. She puts a big dessert spoon beside Deskyl's plate as well as a fork, in case that's easier to handle, and then calls her over to the table. 

She appears promptly, after an acknowledging chirp, and examines the pasta before putting together her plate - meatballs are a yes, spooned carefully on top of the pasta with a finger on the other hand adding a bit of stability to the process, and so is the cheese, in smallish spoonfuls so that it's not as much of a problem when she loses the one to clumsiness, and then she does seem to think that the spoon is the way to go for eating, as well.

She looks up a couple times through the meal, thoughtfully, like she's trying to figure out how to communicate something, but doesn't actually attempt it.

Poor kid, of course she wants to be able to talk and it must be so frustrating. (For Evelyn as well, who badly wants to know more about this kid’s history, not to mention how she’s feeling right now about what must be a strange and baffling situation for her too.)

Evelyn smiles at her, and talks when she can think of something to say, since it’s probably good for Deskyl just to hear more spoken English. She tries to speak slowly and clearly, and keep the chitchat concrete and related to their surroundings, so she can point at nearby objects. The photos on the wall turn out to be a good source of inspiration. 

(Deskyl clearly has some coping mechanisms to handle her clumsiness, whatever its cause, which could mean it’s not new? Maybe it’s been around her whole life, some kind of very specific developmental delay rather than an illness. Evelyn is suddenly wishing she had done more trainings in…something, she’s honestly not even sure what keywords she would have to Google to figure out what’s going on with Deskyl. She had a boy with fetal alcohol syndrome once, who was sort of similarly clumsy, but he also had learning disabilities and that isn’t the impression she’s had of Deskyl so far…)

She’s been mulling over her plans for after dinner, to circumvent the language barrier and try to learn more about Deskyl and where she’s from, but she also wants to make sure she’s giving Deskyl space to express what she wants.

So once she’s done eating - a little bit before Deskyl is, she’s more comfortable with the cutlery and also theoretically on a diet - she sets down her fork, and smiles pleasantly at Deskyl before returning to (pretend to) read her newspaper, watching from the corner of her eye and waiting to see if Deskyl has anything to— well, obviously she won’t have anything to say, but whether she seems to want anything in particular right now...? 

Not especially, while she's eating - not that she minded the interruptions to get more vocabulary - but she does take her alphabet sheet from earlier out of her pocket when she notices Evelyn watching, and slides it over before going back to her meal.

Oh, right, Evelyn still needs to get the photo off her phone memory card onto the computer, and send it to her supervising social worker. She hopes she doesn't run into the weird bug with attachments again, her email program sometimes has issues and she got a younger and more tech-savvy colleague to explain it to her once but she didn't really follow his instructions on troubleshooting it. 

If Deskyl wants her to look at the alphabet, she can do that. She smiles at her and then examines it. Does it look like it might be Chinese characters, or Arabic? 

It's not complicated enough to be Chinese, and the letters are blocky rather than the cursive script of Arabic.

Huh. That's definitely not Chinese or, uh, any of the Asian scripts, Evelyn is failing to remember whether Korean and Japanese and such have their own characters. Not Arabic, either, Arabic is all curly and this is all straight lines. 

Hmm. Evelyn pulls over the notepad she uses for jotting down todo lists when she's on the phone, and writes a large capital letter A. She points at it. "Ayyyy," she says, exaggerating the sound. Then points at the first letter on Deskyl's sheet and waits, expectantly. 

"Aurek. Aaaaaah."

"May I?" Evelyn gestures at her pencil at the space under the foreign letter, and when Deskyl doesn't seem to object, writes "A?" in tiny handwriting. And if Deskyl seems up for it, they can go through all the rest and get letter-sound correspondences. Evelyn is hardly a linguistics expert over here, but it definitely seems to be an alphabet, not a character system like Chinese. Maybe the social services department will have a translator on hand who can figure out the language from this information. 

Oh good, getting a copy of the local alphabet is what she made it for. The first two letters match their English alphabet equivalents, but the correspondence ends there, and some of the letters don't have direct equivalents in the English alphabet at all, but stand for things it represents as digraphs.

Communication! Well, of a kind. Evelyn takes a new photograph, this time including the letter correspondence to the English alphabet, and then finishes clearing away the dinner dishes. For dessert, she offers Deskyl a cookie from the tin she keeps in the cupboard above the fridge. ...And gives in to temptation, and takes one for herself as well. 

Once they've had dessert, she proceeds to the next step of her secret scheme. Or, well, not exactly secret and it's hardly Sherlock Holmes quality work, but she had an idea in the car and she's eager to see if it works out.

The bookshelves in the living room have some knickknacks as well as books, and among them is a globe. Which Evelyn takes down, and brings to Deskyl. She can point out approximately where Reno is on the map, and then she waits, looking expectantly at Deskyl. Who won't necessarily know how to find her home country on a globe, but she might; she's clearly had a decent education. 

It takes her a second to connect the globe to the map from last night, and she tenses up a bit and sighs, when she does. "Eerh, neh." No, that was the wrong sound for that translation. "Nnno?" She waves her hand across the surface of it, palm flat, like she's wiping something away, and produces an incomprehensible but clearly unhappy sentence.

No to what? She doesn't recognize the globe? But Evelyn has a feeling it's a more specific kind of 'no' than just 'I don't know what you're trying to ask me right now.' 

"I'm sorry, dear," she says quietly. "I wish you could talk to me, I'm sure you must have even more questions for me than I have for you." 

"Mmh." She takes the globe from Evelyn and puts it back on the shelf, not that this seems to help her mood very much.