"...Yes." Evelyn really feels like she said that before, but she's also remarked before that it's easy to end up assuming Iomedae's English is better than it really is. "The government pays me to have children living in my home, like it's my job - I mean, it is my job, more or less. And on top of that there are amounts they give me for particular kinds of expenses, like getting you new clothes or supplies for school - a lot of children arrive in foster care without many clothes or belongings, you're not unusual there."

She considers for the moment how to phrase it. "...It's not that they're giving me money that I'm only allowed to spend on something like krav maga. But the idea is that it's normal for good parents to pay for their children - or teenagers - to have nice things like bikes and martial arts classes. The money is so that I can afford to pay for all the same sorts of things I would have for Jeremy at your age, for both of you, as long as you live here. Does that make sense?" 

"How much money they give you to keep us?"

Iiiiiin most cases it would not be a great idea to have this conversation, Evelyn thinks, but - just this once, it actually feels very important to be as honest and open as she can. 

"Right now, a hundred and seventy-five dollars a week for each of you, that's the standard emergency rate - uh, when a kid needs a place to sleep right away, that night, before there's been time for their social worker to get to know them or for them to see a doctor. Plus a hundred and twenty-five dollars for each of you, for clothes and stuff. Once it's been a bit longer, they reassess it, and I may end up getting somewhat more money if Social Services thinks that you need more support than usual to adjust to being in foster care. Which I think you do, most kids coming into foster care grew up in America speaking English, and have already been to school, and things like that. ...The government gives me twelve hundred dollars a month for taking care of Lily right now, because she needs a lot of extra help. I don't think either of you need as much help as Lily, though." 

Iomedae worked very hard, for the last six months, for sixty to seventy dollars a week, and she was not bothered by this, because it was fair pay for her work, in the uncomplicated sense where there were lots of farms and if one offered unusually little pay then workers would go elsewhere and that lords' fruit would rot. 

If America wanted her to live with Evelyn and go to school and had offered her eighty dollars a week to do this she would have done it. 

Instead, of course, America enslaved her, and she is still very angry about this but it's mostly a simmering anger not a burning one at this point.

But the idea that they are willing to pay seven hundred dollars a month, maybe more than that, to Evelyn for keeping her as a slave -

It is not hard to imagine wanting power over another person so much you would be willing to hurt them unfathomably badly to have it. People do that all the time. They shouldn't, but they do. 

It is actually kind of hard to imagine wanting power over a person so much you would be willing to pay more than twice what a laborer can earn every month in order to deny them their freedom.

"America pay you a hundred seventy five dollar a week to make life so bad and I think I no should be mad at you for that because if you did not do it a different person would do it but I am mad at you for that a bit, comparing to when I thinked you just did it to help people."

...That shouldn't hurt. It's so, so far from the first time she's had it flung in her face, that she's only in it for the money. Barely a year ago, Teagan screamed at her that she was taking bribes from the government to run a child prison. 

It does sting a little bit every time, though, and maybe a little bit of that is because she does make a lot of money on this, more than most foster carers she knows, and she's accumulated decades of training and takes specialized foster care placements because those children need help the most, of course, but it's not not about the money; she's a single carer, she doesn't have a husband working on the side like most of her foster parent friends. And she wishes it didn't have to be about the money, that she didn't have to keep her receipts in a box in the study and spreadsheet it out at the end of every month, and the expression on a child's face when she surprises them with the exact Christmas gift they wanted is priceless, of course, but she still has to kick herself at the end of the month, sometimes, laying it out alongside her gas expenses and utilities bills, and the monthly "tax" of replacing clothes cut up and dishes broken by understandably angry children, and the truly spectacular amount one can spend on groceries even when one is being very careful and the amount she sets aside every month so she won't have to dip into the savings account to pay the next quarterly property tax bill. And the sleepless nights, and the occasional wistful thoughts that she could have a nine to five job in a nice quiet civilized office with no screaming ever, let alone at three am, and earn more money than she does now. 

And, of course, her life is still one of unbelievable luxury and abundance and waste, compared to Iomedae's normal, and that hurts too, and it hurts that Iomedae is angry with her and that it's not even unreasonable of her. 

She's - going to try very very hard not to say things out of defensiveness that are a bad idea to say, but she can definitely recognize that she is defensive. She takes a deep breath. 

"I - that's fair. I can see why - some things would mean more to you - if I were doing this for no reward except the reward of helping people, and - I kind of wish it could be like that, sometimes? But I couldn't do it at all if I were paid much less. I don't have other income. I don't have a husband who works. When the government gives me money, it's not just to buy you bikes and krav maga classes. It has to pay for the house," well, complicatedly, "and the water, and the heat and the lights, and fixing things when they break, and it has to pay for my food and clothes and doctor's appointments, and the gas to drive the car, and everything I have that means I can take care of children at all." 

"I thinked you owned land."

Evelyn has no idea what that has to do with anything???? Maybe Iomedae doesn't know that property taxes are a thing. ...That's actually pretty reasonable, maybe property taxes aren't a thing in third world countries, she has no idea. Maybe Iomedae's main association with 'people who own houses' is 'landlords', probably exploitative ones? But Evelyn can't imagine how Iomedae thinks she's earning rental income. What exactly would she be renting out, the back shed? ...Honestly, probably people do live in sheds where Iomedae's from. Ugh. 

"...Yeah, I have a house. I've paid back the loan I took from the bank to buy it, so I own the house outright and the land it's on. I don't own other land, just the lot. My expenses are less now than they were ten years ago when I was still paying the bank back. - uh, very few people are rich enough to just buy a house with cash, it's normal to go to the bank for a big loan that you pay off for most of your adult life, it's one of the only times it's not a stupid idea to go into debt for a big purchase, because this house will be worth more when I retire and sell it than I paid for it at the start. Anyway, now I only have to pay property tax to the government - one of the ways the government gets money is that anyone who owns land or property pays tax on it - but I don't earn any money from rent. ...I guess you could sort of imagine the government is paying rent on my spare bedrooms on your behalf, but I don't earn other income just from owning a house with a backyard." 

"You own only the land of your house which you do not plant, not any land plants grow on?"

Evelyn is so confused. The backyard totally has plants, even if okay fine they're kind of sad plants, she neither has a green thumb nor the spare time to maintain a garden– ohhhhhh. Right. Iomedae was a farm worker, before...okay maybe on reflection this makes more sense.

"....I do not own any land with farms on it, no, I don't think I know anyone who does. Did you - assume I had this entire other source of income from owning farms somewhere...?" 

"You are a rich woman who does not work, so I thinked you own land, people work the land, you get money. In Taldor this would be how there is a rich woman who does not work, because no one would pay her the cost of keep up a very big very nice house like your house for keeping slaves and she could not earn enough to keep up the big nice house with just the work of a few slaves."

It is so deeply unreasonable to feel hurt and angry at Iomedae, just because it's the sort of sentiment she's picked up between the lines - never quite said out loud - from white-collar office workers at the sort of holiday event she just doesn't go to anymore because kids who randomly smear feces on the floor are not welcome, the sense that obviously being a stay-at-home mom isn't a job and obviously it's no different if it's being a stay-at-home mom for other people's children. It's not work, it's in some way vaguely unfeminist, and of course nobody says it but it's still there. 

It's unreasonable because Iomedae is coming from a different world, a world where ten dollars a day to pick fruit seemed like an upgrade from most people's circumstances. It's unreasonable because Iomedae is trapped, and hurting, pinned down by a system that gives her no avenues toward any of the things that matter to her, in a nonsensical world that, despite its absurd-to-her wealth and technology, is still full of inexplicable rules and walls and inexorable bureaucracies that destroy her friends' lives for no reason. 

...She's abruptly not angry anymore, just tired. 

"I do work. I'm a foster parent; I take care of kids who aren't safe with their family, or don't have a family at all. That's my job. I get paid for it because that's how jobs work. ...You can say that you'd have been better off if the system had left you alone, and you wouldn't be the first foster kid to say that to me, and you might even be right. I know I'm not giving you what you need, and I'm sorry.

"But it's - my friends who have other jobs sometimes tell me they could never be a foster parent, because it would be too hard." Yeah, okay, maybe she's in fact still very defensive, and maybe at this point it's not fair to Iomedae to keep trying and failing to hide it. She takes a deep breath. "It's not your fault and I'm not angry with you, about anything, but - I find it pretty hurtful, when people say I'm just a woman who doesn't work." 

"I am sorry. Maybe I not know the English for - the thing I mean. I do not think it is bad to be a person owns land. It is good. People own land are better than people who do not.

 And no one make clothes here, or wash them, or carry water, or wash dishes, because you have machines for this, and that is good and of God, it would not be better if you had to do this."

Presumably Iomedae does not mean the thing it kind of sounds like - that landowners are more deserving or virtuous or morally upright or something, which is absolutely a claim that raises Evelyn's hackles - because that would be an insane thing for Iomedae to believe alongside the rest of her belief system and moral convictions. She probably means the thing that does match with everything else she believes - that wealth and progress and abundance are good, that what God wants is for everyone to someday have the security of a house that belongs to them. Well, Evelyn can get behind that. 

"...I think we're still - talking around some kind of really big gap in how we expect the world to work?"

She wishes she could close her eyes. Inconvenient how she's driving; at least there continues to be literally no traffic.

She takes a deep breath. "I don't really want to have whatever conversation it's going to take to figure out what. I'm....I'm tired, honestly, and it's been such a week, and I am trying very hard not to - have feelings at you - because you don't deserve that and it's not your fault and I'm supposed to be the adult who has it together. But I think I've been wronging you, by not trying hard enough to understand, and - I keep hurting you by accident, with things like the bike payment, because I don't understand the thing I'm missing. I want to understand - not because it's my job that the government pays me to do, plenty of foster parents don't try, plenty of birth parents don't try - but because it's actually really upsetting seeing you be angry and scared all the time and not understanding why or how I can help, and it would be nice if I could solve that as easily as buying you a nice bike and getting you fighting lessons, but I clearly can't." 

Sigh. "...That's not a demand that you talk to me. If you don't trust me, then that's - really understandable, for one - and it's not something I get to demand, it's something I have to earn. 

...I'm sorry, is all. I want you to be okay." 

"- if you do not want to have conversation, you say, Iomedae stop this, I tell you a better time? Or is the thing you just said, you saying that?"

....Okay, that's fair enough, she was Being Vulnerable(TM) and that is not the same thing as being maximally clear to a kid with limited English. 

"I'm sorry that was confusing. I - am finding the conversation hard to have while driving, and I think we should pause it until we're home and you've had a shower and some food. And possibly until tomorrow when Lily is in school, if it turns out that you're exhausted and want to sleep. I might find it upsetting, but - I care more about you being okay than I do about not having upsetting conversations. Having upsetting conversations comes up a lot in this job." 

"Yes, ma'am." She doesn't sound upset at all and doesn't speak for the rest of the drive.

Evelyn wants to give both of them a hug right now. Evelyn does not always get what she wants and is pretty used to this. It is, again, something you sort of sign up for with this job. 

They go in. Evelyn spreads out still-warm Chinese takeout on the table. She's not actually hungry and her waistline doesn't need it, but she takes a plate anyway, just to make it obvious that it's okay and expected for the girls, who must have just burned a ton of calories, to do that. 

Chinese takeout tastes really weird and oily but Iomedae is not a picky eater. 

Evelyn has a lot of fond memories built up around Chinese takeout to make it feel like a rare indulgence, but it is objectively speaking kind of a weird cuisine, especially if you're used to eating corn tortillas and beans out of a can and consider stew with some ground beef in it to be luxurious rich person's food. 

She eats in friendly silence. She tries to figure out - something - she's not sure what, it feels like a prerequisite to 'what she should say.' And of course one of the hardest-won lessons of the last twenty years is that sometimes there isn't a right thing to say, sometimes there isn't a promise you can make so that a child will feel safe, because children aren't programmed toys where you can press the right button and get trust. They have their own entire worlds inside their head, that Evelyn can never do more than glimpse the edges of; that's not a problem specific to Iomedae and Alfirin, it's just as true of Lily. 

Her head is buzzing with the content of what Iomedae was saying - trying to say - to her, and she is pretty sure that they're getting close to - whatever it was that made Iomedae angry about the bike situation. But it actually that feels like that's a distraction, right now. She smiles blandly, and - does something that she's never been able to describe better, when her fostering friends ask her how on earth she manages it, than 'it's like letting your eyes go out of focus on the room, except it's on the interaction you're stuck in the middle of.' 

...It feels adversarial. That's - not new - it's almost universal, actually, this early on. But it's not the same, because - why - because it feels like it shouldn't have to be. It feels like Iomedae is the sort of person who's always trying to extend an olive branch, to bridge that gap, and she can't help herself even once she's decided not to trust Evelyn. Maybe it's ridiculous to say that "Iomedae expressing her anger at Evelyn for being paid to foster children" as an olive branch, but to Evelyn that's what it is. 

It doesn't feel like there are words she can say to convince Iomedae that she's safe. She...doesn't actually want to convince Iomedae that's she safe, which is odd, because it's always felt like very fundamentally the most important thing - that kids can't grow, can't spread their wings, can't even form attachments, unless they feel safe. Evelyn isn't convinced that Alfirin doesn't need this very badly, though right now it seems like she's seeking it out from Iomedae, her trusted friend who understands her, and not the foster mother standing in for a faceless system that tore in and out of their lives like a tornado and deposited them on her doorstep. But Iomedae....

...Iomedae isn't a kid.

It's sort of inane, put in words like that, even words in the privacy of her own head. Iomedae is, after all, still fifteen, still basically illiterate, still in some ways very...it feels absurd to think it, but sheltered? Evelyn can't quite figure out what it is she thinks Iomedae was sheltered from, but it feels related to her unexpected indignance at the ways that a modern country of three hundred million people more or less has to work. 

But Iomedae doesn't want or need a parent who she trusts to make sure everything works out fine. 

She needs something, that's for sure. She's practically crying out for it in every single conversation. But it's not to return to childhood. She had her childhood, with loving parents who she trusted, however poor and unfortunately patriarchal they were. She flew the nest. 

She needs someone to help her fight Hell. 

- great!!! Thank you, Evelyn's brain, for that deep insight!!! What on earth is she supposed to do about it??? 

(Evelyn has mostly not been making interesting facial expressions for the last several minutes, but it's fairly clear that she's preoccupied.) 

She clears her throat. "Girls, I'm going to go sit in the other room for a bit, okay? I want to," think thoughts that are more productive than that one, "watch some television and chill. And I do think we should talk more about the...money stuff...and do that tonight if you have the energy for it - but food and showers first, no offense but you both smell like a teenage boys' locker room." 

Evelyn is tempted to leave the other half implicit, but - you know what, no, actually she thinks one of the ways she's been screwing up here is smoothing things over and leaving them under the surface and not just saying out loud with her actual mouth what she's doing and why. She has mixed feelings and as many as several questions about whatever on earth the girls talked about last night with Emily and her lovely girlfriend, but it does seem like they made progress, on - understanding some more of the disconnect between the world they knew growing up and America - and Evelyn is pretty sure that's because Emily is not the sort of person to shove anything under the rug rather than face the awkwardness. 

She smiles crookedly. "And you could probably use some time to talk privately in Taldane, I'm not sure how much of the conversation in the car Alfirin followed." 

She heads to the other room. 

When Iomedae is told to back off she does, and she doesn't get upset about it either. This was a fairly important element of getting her father to put up with her. She smiles at Evelyn, sincerely. "Yes, ma'am."

Evelyn smiles more widely at her and wants to - considers stopping herself - ends up not stopping herself from patting Iomedae's shoulder as she walks past to the other room.

(She leaves her half-finished plate behind. Her stomach is a little upset, like it always is when she's stressed, and she did enough stress-eating during the first few weeks with Lily when she was getting five hours of sleep a night, she doesn't need to do it now when she's getting plenty of sleep and objectively speaking a lot of lovely breaks today and the main difficulty is....whatever the word even is, she's not sure.) 

...Iomedae is being very...deliberately polite and deferent, or something...and - not that Evelyn is complaining, to be clear - it feels like Iomedae is applying strategy here, and it's a learned strategy for getting what she wants. She's seen it before. God, Teagan did it sometimes. (Not very often.)

Evelyn in general has pretty mixed feelings about, you know, the type of childhood background that results in teenage girls who do "the thing". And - this wasn't the case with Teagan specifically, who seemed to have instead picked the strategy of "not caring if she got hit" - but she's looked after other teenage girls where "the thing" absolutely had an undertone of "and this is how I appease you enough that you won't hit me". And, assuming that Evelyn's ability to get a read on Iomedae isn't utterly unreliable thanks to the culture gap which is really more of a bottomless culture chasm, is pretty sure she's picking up on more than zero of that from Iomedae. ...Maybe being hit isn't the thing, Iomedae clearly doesn't find it that unpleasant (the bruises were developing further by the time she left the room), but - things that are emotionally like that, in the mind of a child, and Iomedae might be - less or differently - a child now, than the usual fifteen-year-old, but this one does feel like a childhood habit. 

....She can chew on that particular thread later. (Also her brain can stop mixing its metaphors, please and thank you.) The main problem here is not, actually, related to whether Iomedae's father - she thinks it's probably father in particular, not that she has any idea why and maybe it's just dumb sexist stereotypes - would hit her for 'talking back' more than he could tolerate. The point is that, well, sometimes kids with those kind of habits actually feel safer if you give them firm lines rather than relentless compassion. 

She sits down on the sofa and fiddles with the remote. Finds a station replaying a particularly mindless soap opera rerun. (The background noise helps. For whatever ridiculous reason, it makes her feel less - listened in on? - by Iomedae and Alfirin.) 

Right. Productive thoughts about what Iomedae needs, please.