"Tortillas rice beans. On holy day beans with bacon bits in. I eat ten tortilla and two cups rice and two big cans beans a day, working. Here I eat less because no work."

That's not the worst diet - and Iomedae is a healthy weight and looks like she was getting enough protein - but it definitely sounds like it might eventually give you scurvy or something. Maybe they were sometimes allowed to eat some of the fruit and veggies they were picking? 

She nods. "I like beans! Though usually with more things in, I guess you didn't have a good way to do much cooking? And I think it's good for children to have lots of fruits and vegetables too. I have a Mexican bean stew recipe I like, we could cook that together tonight? ...And something else for Lily, she doesn't like beans, though maybe she'll be willing to try it if she sees you liking it." 

"Not like beans? Children should eat what is cook."

"...It makes sense that you would more or less have to, if your family was very poor. And I will insist that children eat healthy foods and not only treats. But I have enough money to buy nutritious healthy food that Lily likes better, and - there are already a lot of things that are difficult to her to adjust to. I think some foster carers like me are stricter about expecting kids to eat whatever the rest of the family is having, but I - try not to have too many rules that will be hard for kids to follow, and Lily doesn't have to eat beans to be safe and healthy." 

She thinks about that one for a while. "It is good be rich," she says eventually. "It is bad be - only able to live if rich. Lily get the land, when she grow up?"

Evelyn blinks at her. 

"You mean my...house...?" What does that even have to do with anything. "- No. I guess my son Jeremy would if I don't sell it first when I retire, but Lily isn't legally my child, she's a ward of the state - that means legally the Social Services office is sort of like her parents - and she's unlikely to stay with me until she's eighteen. Once she's - doing better - then Social Services will try to find a relative, like one of her parents' brothers or sisters, or a family who can't have children of their own and wants to adopt her - that means making her legally their child, like she was born there - and raise her. But she'll never be - in as bad a situation as you were, before."

(Probably that won't happen. Most adoptive couples want healthy (white) babies, and Lily is an older child with a speech delay and a lot of emotional damage from her past, who is likely to face a lot of struggles as she gets older. The best case scenario for her is if Social Services can find an aunt or uncle willing to take her as a kinship placement; the more likely case is that she ends up placed with a different family for long-term fostering, and the worst but not that unlikely case is that she ends up in a children's group home. Evelyn would adopt every child who came through her door if she could, but Social Services almost certainly wouldn't judge that in Lily's best interests, when Evelyn is a single carer over fifty - and, of course, very experienced with a lot of specialized fostering training, and they want her bedrooms available for the kids no one else will take. Evelyn does not think Iomedae needs to hear about all the quiet tragedies of foster care right now, so she's not going to bring it up.) 

" - I don't see why she never need work in field and eat beans, if she no parents and no land."

...Wow. Okay. In hindsight, that's an assumption that - in hindsight makes perfect sense from Iomedae's knowledge of the world. 

Where to start...

"Lily might be poorer than me when she grows up and lives on her own, yeah. Not because she's a foster child, plenty of foster kids do well at school and go to college and get decent jobs, but Lily has a hard time at school. If she doesn't finish school, she might get a job as a cashier at a store or something, and she would earn more money than the workers do - the jobs you can do without papers pay less - but not enough money to have her own house, or a nice car." At least as long as she doesn't succumb to drugs and alcohol, but - hopefully they got her out of her childhood environment in time. "She probably couldn't buy a new TV or a computer or the nicest kind of phone." Plenty of very poor people do, of course, on financing, but hopefully Lily will learn better than to go into credit card debt. "Even if she can't work as an adult and the government has to give her money to live - she can get that because she's a US citizen, she has papers proving she was born here - she could still afford a little apartment and second-hand clothes. And there are lots of foods that aren't very expensive, not just beans?"

Sigh. "I hope Lily does better in life than her birth parents did, and I think she can. But when Lily lived with her birth family, she was very poor. Her mother didn't work and had money from the government," and probably spent a lot of it on drugs, too, "and Lily ate a lot of pasta and ramen and white bread, because those are also cheap. Those are the foods that she likes, because she's used to them. Probably the children with the workers like beans because it's what they're used to. ...Also it's just very normal for adults to like more kinds of food than kids." 

There's a lot to process there. She is confused but not sure about what, and she doesn't like the feeling.

"...only people do well school get good jobs?"

Evelyn is totally unsurprised that Iomedae is confused in ways where she doesn't know the right questions to ask to get unconfused!  Hopefully taking Iomedae out for errands will help, and the educational ESL video will help, and - they'll get there eventually. 

"It's not the only way someone can make as much money as I do, but it definitely helps, and it's - pretty necessary to make a lot more money than I do, unless someone - gets very lucky." She does not feel like trying to explain professional sports to Iomedae, let alone the concept of winning the lottery, and it's a side point. "People who aren't good at the reading and writing part of school but are good at doing things with their hands can do a trade program instead of college, where they learn how to - hmm, repair cars or tractors, or fix the pipes in houses that water comes out of or the wires that make the lights go on. Those can be pretty good jobs too." So is the military but she's worried that explaining it now will make Iomedae assume it's more or less a holy warrior order, which it really isn't. "And even jobs like that, you need to be able to read and write okay and do more math than just addition and subtraction, because we use reading and writing and basic math for so many things." 

"What jobs people work if no can learn read and write and math because not very clever?"

Oh no is she upset. It's - a pretty reasonable question, for someone of Iomedae's background. 

"Well, nearly everyone who grows up in America learns to read and write at least some, even if they're not as clever and hardworking as you, because school is free - and it's convenient for poor parents, because the school watches their children while they're at work so they don't have to pay a babysitter - so most kids go to school starting when they're a couple years younger than Lily, and even if they learn slowly they have lots of years to learn. You don't have to be able to read very well, or have finished school, to be a store cashier, or work at a gas station, or drive a truck to deliver food to stores. If someone can't read much at all, but they have papers, I think they could probably still do construction work like building houses or fixing roads, or they could be a janitor and clean buildings, or restock the shelves at a store or something. The minimum wage in Nevada - for people who have papers, I realize that the workers you know are in a worse situation - is eight dollars an hour, so even very unskilled jobs pay that much." 

- for some reason Evelyn had never super considered it from this angle before, but American society really does shut out the illiterate, doesn't it - which must seem even more unfair to Iomedae, who doesn't take literacy for granted as a basic competency that everyone should have by age eight, and whose main social group up until now consisted of people who hadn't grown up in America or been able to take advantage of the school system, and whose own children were shut out as well thanks to their lack of paperwork. 

And, well, even the most disadvantaged kids can grow up to work in construction and afford an apartment, but they - so often don't. They're the statistics you see thrown around for "outcomes of foster care" – the homeless, the addicted, the single mothers struggling to get by on their meagre welfare check, the women trapped in abusive marriages because they can't afford the rent otherwise. She - doesn't usually think about that, for some reason, she tells herself that her foster children will certainly grow up to beat the odds, and often they do, but - that doesn't mean that those aren't the odds, or that all the others don't exist, the ones who weren't as lucky, who never had someone fighting their corner, the damaged kids who spent their childhood bouncing from one family to another to an institution without ever really having a home. 

She feels kind of shitty about it now. 

"Eight dollars an hour is so good money. 

Lily have hard time marry because orphan?"

...Wow, Evelyn really does keep failing to predict all the very predictable opinions and assumptions that someone with Iomedae's past and background is going to have. 

Also, the truth is that Lily's adult relationship prospects are just - not great, compared to if she had grown up in a loving two-parent family. They don't know for sure, because Lily has said approximately not a single word about her home life before foster care - and was quite possibly threatened into silence - but Evelyn at least is pretty suspicious that she was sexually abused. Even leaving that aside, the relationship models she's observed were pretty dysfunctional. (Which is a reason Evelyn thinks she would do better if she can eventually move to a two-parent family, because it's not like Evelyn can be a role model on that particular front.) It's - maybe the single area where Evelyn worries the most about Lily ending up as a statistic. Several of her previous foster children in not-too-dissimilar situations ended up finishing school and have reasonable jobs and their lives together except for their utterly disastrous taste in men, because - it's what they know, right, in a way it's what feels familiar and safe. 

"She's not an orphan, her parents just can't give her a safe home or take good care of her," Evelyn says, not that this is really the point. "I hope that she'll end up meeting a lovely boy who treats her nicely, once she's older," a lot older, Evelyn is kind of weirded out by thinking about Lily's dating prospects when ideally that's a decade off, "but - she doesn't have to get married, to have a happy life. I'm not married. Plenty of women don't get married, or wait until they're thirty, because they want to focus on their job before they start a family." 

"I know this. I not marry. Is very hard obey God and husband, most holy orders say no try. And a baby need a mother love the baby, stay for the baby, and I leave everything march on Hell when strong enough.

But if a girl not holy warrior and not have a trade and not have land and not have parents - pretty smart to marry."

Iomedae is so understandably missing such a huge swath of context and Evelyn is sliding into a morass of uncertainty about which gaps to fill in next. Saying but this is the twenty-first century won't even mean anything to Iomedae. 

"She hopefully will have a trade. That's - part of what we hope will happen, when Social Services takes kids into care, that we can give them support and opportunities, and they'll grow up healthy and finish school and get a good job and contribute to society rather than living on money from the government, and so it's worth it even though paying for foster care also costs the government money. ...And of course it's nice to be married, if someone wants to be, and it makes the finances easier to have two people both working, or if she ended up wanting a family one of them could stay at home with the kids. I won't say it wasn't harder, when my husband and I separated - and he was still sending me a little bit of money, for looking after Jeremy - but I made it work." 

'all girls should have a trade, and it's nice to be married, if one happens to enjoy it, but it works out fine regardless' is the most insane theory of how to have a prosperous home Iomedae has ever heard but that doesn't make it necessarily wrong about this place. 

She spends another while trying to even come up with a coherent question. 

"If you took ill before son grown who would care for you?"

"Hmm. If I got sick with something that a hospital can treat, I have good health insurance through the fostering agency - 'insurance' means I pay some money every month and the agency pays some for me, to a company that takes money from a lot of people, and if one of them gets very sick, the company will pay the hospital for them. It works out for the company even though the hospital is very expensive if someone has to stay a long time, because not very many people get sick enough to need the hospital at all. So hopefully I would get better, and I have a different insurance that would pay me half of what I earn from working for a few months while I was resting at home. ...If I got really sick, and I wasn't going to get better enough to work again, I would have to sell the house and move to a little apartment, but then I could live on savings and money from the government for a pretty long time."

She frowns, thinking. "- If Jeremy were done college and had a job and a house of his own, he might want me to live with him instead of by myself, but I wouldn't ask that of him if he didn't offer, he should have his own life. I also have a lot of good friends who would want to help and might ask me to live with them, and I have savings in the bank, including from when my parents died and I sold their house and all their things, but it's in a retirement account now so it's harder to spend it before I'm sixty-five years old. If I had gotten sick when Jeremy was little, my parents would have been still alive and they would have looked after Jeremy and given me money, I think, although they had less money than I do so it would have been hard for them." 

Maybe that's also how nobles would do that at home. Iomedae isn't sure. 

"I think I understand a bit, ma'am."

"- It's a good question to bring up, though, because getting very sick is one of the things that can ruin someone's life if they're poor to start with. A lot of minimum wage jobs that you can do without finishing school won't cover health insurance, so someone would have to pay for the hospital themselves, which in practice means that the hospital sends them a bill they can't pay and they end up in a lot of debt. ...Debt means that someone, usually a bank, gave you money as part of an agreement that you would pay it back later with some extra, and it's good to have that option because sometimes you can spend that money on things that mean you can earn more later - and for a house it's normal to take out a loan, because almost no one can save enough to pay for a house in cash, so you pay the bank slowly over lots of years, but it's a better idea because houses usually are worth more money ten years later and if you have to sell it, you get enough back to pay the rest of the loan and still have money left over. But being in debt to the hospital isn't like that, you can't sell your health. It's still better than being dead, but someone who had a minimum wage job before is still going to be in a bad situation even if they get better and can work again. It's - one of the ways America isn't perfect even if we are the richest country in the world." 

“It is not among the reasons I would give America isn’t perfect. You rich, but not help poor other places. You have so many laws and they not make sense. A man attack a woman and it take months see a judge. You no have holy warrior orders. You a hundred times richer than Taldor, still not fixed Hell. You no have god healing so workers hurt always. Your churches no see stars. Many things here good but I would have said a place this rich would be so much more good and Evil could not stand long. Maybe all the riches of Heaven not enough, need also all the courage and all the honor and all the - knowing things still matter if they happen to other people.”

She looks a little surprised at herself, when she stops.

Wow. Harsh. Not...entirely unfair...and if anything it makes her feel even more fond of Iomedae...but harsh. 

"...Yeah. America's government does send money to poorer countries, actually," though not a lot, isn't it less 1% of the federal budget, "and a lot of people who can spare a bit of money for charity will send it to charities that work in poorer countries, and sometimes people who are very rich donate a lot or they found their own charities. I usually make a donation at Christmas, although I can't spare all that much," mostly because she can never help herself from spending more on her foster children than is technically covered by the spending allowance, so it comes out of the not-spectacularly generous foster care "wages", and - sure, they need help, but children in Africa need help too - children in Africa are actually starving, not just short of their own toys and belongings - and wow she is doing a lot of feeling like a shitty thoughtless person in this conversation.

"And the government lets some people come to the US legally if their home country has a war and their family is in danger there." And of course the US military sometimes intervenes in foreign wars on humanitarian grounds, that's just...not a track record that comes off as one of the US's crowning achievements. "There's just - a limited number of people allowed per year, and just being poor isn't enough. I - know we could be doing a lot more, if everyone were - like you - but I think it's complicated, and there's a lot of world." 

...Evelyn is mildly baffled about the mention of churches not seeing stars. Is - seeing the stars an important religious ritual for Iomedae's family? That's so random.

She's also just not going to touch the part about Americans insufficiently believing in faith healing, let alone the part about fixing Hell, because she still has no idea what to say. That seems like a God-sized problem, not a human-sized problem? Iomedae would not respond well to it, and - well, the actual thing is that Evelyn...mostly doesn't go around thinking about Hell...? She has done more thinking-about-Hell in the last day than she had in the last five years and she's not a fan.

(There's something very surreal about the idea of the US military declaring war on Hell - which does seem like a more "just" war than Afghanistan - but she doesn't think that's the sort of thing you can do.) 

“The cars complicated. Costco complicated. People do complicated things when they want do them. End Hell very complicated and I do it anyway or die trying, and if anyone ask me why not ended Hell yet answer always be not strong enough yet.”

Nod. "I think - in a world where most people aren't like you, because they aren't - it's harder to get a lot of people to work on a very hard complicated thing when it's...only going to be good if it succeeds? Costco and cars weren't - big projects that people set out with a big plan to achieve on purpose - they just sort of happened over the last few hundred years, with the Industrial Revolution - that's when we got more technology and started to get a lot richer - and every step was just, people doing the thing in front of them. There were a few important inventors - very smart people who build new things - but I think it was easier for them to get everyone else excited, when it was - gradual like that." 

This conversation is getting really philosophical to be having across a language barrier, and also Evelyn is noticing herself feeling kind of defensive (more on behalf of America than on behalf of herself, she's not in denial about the fact that she's never been the sort of person who tries to change the world), and the combination means that probably they should, instead, not be having this conversation, but cutting it off and changing the topic also feels kind of bad. 

“It is your home. I - not ask you speak ill of it. I sorry. I angry with people at home this, too. As you say it how people everywhere, have to change them if you want them be different.”