...That was a fascinating reaction and Evelyn should maybe try to poke Lily about it later. Tomorrow. 

"How about the song now?" she says cheerfully. "Lily, it's time to close your eyes and think about nice things." Such as, for example, not the bad man, either in the story or the one in Lily's memories. Is that a normal bedtime story for small children where Iomedae grew up????? 

Now she'll sing a song, in a totally unfamiliar language but very beautifully. 

Hands chip the flint, light the fire, skin the kill

Feet move the tribe track the herd with a will

Mankind struggles on the edge of history

Time to settle down, time to grow, time to breed

Plow tills the soil, plants the seed, pray for rain

Scythe reaps the wheat, to the mill, to grind the grain

Towns and cities spread to empire overnight

Hands keep building as we chant the ancient rite -

Ink marks the paper, moves the wheel, shifts the skies

Mortal hands seize the stars for our designs

Lightning harnessed does our will and lights the dark

Keep rising higher, set our goal, hit the mark...

It's a beautiful melody and Iomedae looks...calm and serene and at peace, while she sings it. It doesn't sound like a song about Hell or murder. Evelyn decides to gently and casually ask her what it's about once they go downstairs. 

Lily's eyes drift closed, then bob open, then close again. Evelyn kisses her goodnight, and she sleepily requests a goodnight kiss from Iomedae too, before Evelyn turns on her nightlight and switches off the overhead light and ducks out, leaving the door ajar. 

"The song is about people. I don't - have all the words. About how we start with nothing, and if we work hard we will have everything. Water in houses, if we work hard every house will have water in it. And light at night, and no one will go to Hell - that's not in the song but I think it."

"That's lovely." Evelyn means it, too. Even the bit about Hell, it's concerning that Iomedae's religion apparently emphasizes Hell so much but obviously not wanting anyone to go to Hell is the best possible response. "Is that what your religion teaches? ...Only, I'm confused, because here in America I think almost everyone has running water in their house, and there are very religious people who don't but it's usually because they think technology," does Iomedae know that word yet? "- things like cars and running water and electric lights and the Internet, are dangerous or not in God's plan." 

...Hopefully that doesn't come off as a hurtful or incredibly insensitive thing to say about Iomedae's birth family. It felt right, though. 

" - no, God thinks that lights and water and tractors are good. I can explain it to people when I have more English, if the devils spread lies."

Right, it makes sense that she would have encountered tractors before cars, if she spent the last six months picking fruit on farms to earn enough to feed herself. (Did no one notice she was fifteen? She's a sturdy fifteen, sure, she looks more than strong enough for physical labor, but she doesn't convincingly pass for older than eighteen. Did the supervisors just not ask questions? Or is common for illegal migrants to bring their teenage children with them to earn more?)

Also Evelyn has so many questions about the religious teachings she grew up with??? It doesn't fit. And Iomedae isn't talking about it like it's her own interpretation or personal beliefs, she's talking about it like it's a basic fact about the world. ("If the devils are spreading lies"??? Concern!) 

She nods. "I want to help you learn more English. You can always stop me if you don't know what a word means and I'll tell you." She doesn't feel incredibly qualified, but Iomedae is clearly diligent and has picked up a lot in six months, which is even more impressive given that she was probably mostly staying with non-native-English speakers. "By the way, if your Spanish is better than your English, my Spanish is much worse than my English but I have Google Translate to help. And my son Jeremy took some Spanish in high school and might be better than me."

They've reached the kitchen. "Have a seat," Evelyn says, gesturing at the table. "I'll make us some cocoa and then we can talk." Maybe she'll pull out some chocolate chip cookies, too, the kid looks like she probably burns a lot of calories. 

She'll sit. "I know more Spanish. I can say Spanish when I don't know English, if you have a man who speaks it."

Evelyn puts a pot of milk on the stove to heat. "I don't think Jeremy is fluent exactly but I'm sure Social Services has an interpreter for anything really important - if the police need to talk to you, they can do it in Spanish. Google Translate isn't a person, it's a program on the computer– ...Maybe you haven't seen computers. They're - machines that can remember information to look up, or send it to other computers on the Internet - it seems sort of like they can think but they can't really, they just follow rules." That was a terrible explanation of computers. Really they need Jeremy here for this. 

"- I did not know most words, ma'am, sorry."

...Nod. "Sorry. I'll show you, after." While the milk is heating, she takes down the tin of cookies from on top of the fridge and brings it over. "You can have some of these. - Actually, have you eaten dinner? Did they give you food at the hospital?" 

"No, ma'am."

You should have said something, Evelyn doesn't say, because she is not at all surprised that this polite biddable helpful child didn't want to complain about being hungry. She must be, though. "I'll heat you up something more filling to have first. ...Do you eat meat?" She thinks some religious groups don't but she can't remember which ones. "We had shepherd's pie for dinner. It's beef - uh, cow meat - and mashed potatoes and vegetables." 

"I eat meat but I do not know if I have meat money."

Uhhhhhhhh. 

"...Iomedae, you live here. This is your house. As long as that's true, I'm going to be paying for your food and clothes. I can afford it. Social Services gives me some money to look after kids like you." 

"I am not a kid. You should give the money to the hungry. I pay."

Oh. Oh dear. This is going to be...tricky. Especially with the vocabulary limitation. 

Evelyn puts a plate of shepherd's pie in the microwave, and adds cocoa mix to the now-hot milk and stirs it in before switching off the heat, quickly pouring two mugs, and bringing them to the table. 

"Iomedae, I'm going to explain some things, but stop me if you don't understand words. Okay?"

She waits for confirmation.

"I know your family lived with different rules. But here there are laws that are different, and so the rules in my house are different. In America, the law says that you aren't a grownup until you're eighteen, though when you're sixteen - if you know enough English by then, and other things, you have a lot of learning to catch up on - you can go live with other people your age in a group home if you want. But right now, the law is that you should have a parent responsible for you, and my job is to be a parent, for a little while, for kids who can't live with their own parents. Like Lily, but also like you. It's not that you can't work, clearly you did manage on your own for a long time, it's just - you shouldn't be working on farms and not even making enough money to eat meat or buy new clothes. You should be learning more writing and math and other things so that when you're older you can work a better job. Does that make sense?" 

"I know writing and math. I can study and work. No one can study every hour there is light.

But if there is money for kids with no parents, for the poor, it would be evil, me taking it. I am not a kid. I am not poor. It would be - God would not have me as a holy warrior, if I took money for the poor."

This is so frustrating. Evelyn is pretty good at not showing her frustration when it really, really won't help, but it is and also she slightly wants to cry. 

"- I know you don't think of yourself as poor," she says, choosing her words carefully. "But in this country, you are. So are all of the people you worked with for the last few months, and - sometimes people are just poor, it's hard for even a very rich country to help all of them - but this is the richest country in the world and we can at least help kids. If any of them are younger than eighteen," and born in the US but that's complicated to get into, "they would also get help, if anyone knew they needed it."

How to convey it...

"See this house?" She gestures around her. "Do you think this is a rich person's house?" 

"Yes."

"...Actually, stay there, I need to check something." Specifically, she needs to run to her study and Google the average annual salary in the US.

...Or median household income, she is after all a household, and Google is giving her median instead of average and once upon a time Evelyn knew the difference but it's probably fine? 

"I earn a bit more money in a year than the median person in the US. That means almost half of all the people in this country earn more money than me."

(It's somewhat more complicated than that, Nevada is relatively low cost of living - no state tax! - and moderately inconveniently-located suburbs in Reno are a lot cheaper than downtown Vegas, there are a lot of other places where her earnings wouldn't stretch nearly as far - and Dan paid child support while Jeremy was a minor - and her mortgage is paid off, which means she's sitting on almost a quarter-million dollars worth of money and could get a substantial loan in cash if she refinanced. But close enough.) 

"Anyway. I can afford meat, and I can afford to take care of you, and I want to do that so that you can learn enough to have a good job, and afford a house like this one." 

Would it help to suggest she consider it a loan, since if she stays in care long enough to get a high school diploma, and gets a higher-earning job, she'll pay taxes some of which will go to Social Services and pay for other children to have parents? ...Probably way too complicated, she has no idea if Iomedae has heard of, like, banks. Or taxes, come to think of it, she vaguely recalls that some religious groups kind of just don't pay taxes. 

"....the kids I worked with are hungry. And not eighteen. And the country is rich, and can feed them. We should go feed them."

Awwwwwwwww. This girl!!!! is causing Evelyn to have emotions!!! 

"I agree. All kids should have enough to eat." She can explain why it's more complicated than that once Iomedae has the vocabulary to make it a less confusing and frustrating conversation on both sides. ...Also she needs to not under any circumstances let this child find out about starving people in Africa yet, in case she immediately tries to run away to Africa and fix it, which seems like exactly the kind of thing she might do. "But - you can't feed all of the kids if you're barely making enough money to feed yourself, right?" 

Sigh. "...Can we talk about this in a couple of months? Once your English is good? It's wonderful that you want to help people so badly, but - I want you to be thinking about your future." 

"No, we should go now. They are hungry now. You have this house, and they sleep in a tent, or in a car, with lots of other people, and they are scared and they are hungry and we can feed them. They also a future to thinking about."