Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Author:Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Shortly after Cesar discovered Coco was pregnant by Wishman, Coco learned that Cesar had been courting Roxanne all along. Unknown to Coco still, Cesar had been writing Giselle and Lizette and several other girls. “He’s a motherfucker and I’m a bitch. We’re both the same and we’ll never change,” Coco said. Like Cesar, she worried constantly about money, and now, even more so, since her departure from Thorpe House was imminent.

For months, Coco had been scheduled for placement in a renovated apartment through the Special Initiative Program, SIP. The tenement was on 173rd and Vyse, not far from where Lourdes had once lived, but construction delays and paperwork kept postponing the move. In SIP buildings, a social worker would be available to help residents like Coco keep their disorganized lives on track, and ideally, with day care and other supports, Coco would find her way back to school or to a job. Coco’s other options were Section 8—a federal rent-voucher program that paid the difference between 30 percent of a poor family’s income and the fair-market rent—or the projects. It had taken Sister Christine some maneuvering to lure Coco away from the idea of the projects, where the housing authority covered the cost of gas and electricity. Coco didn’t pay rent at Thorpe and already couldn’t manage, even with her avid devotion to budgeting. Earlier that winter, Coco had agreed to take a look at the refurbished SIP building, and after seeing the bright, freshly painted place—near a park where her girls could play—she’d returned to Thorpe House thrilled.

But Coco’s open excitement made her the subject of envy among her fellow residents, and she became a target for ridicule. Had she been able to move out quickly, she might have escaped the usual snittiness, but the delays gave the discouragement of others time to take effect. Some of the residents, and one member of the staff, told her how the nuns received a commission for every person they sent to SIP; that men weren’t allowed even to visit; that the staff was nosier than the shelter’s; and that the on-site social worker did double duty as an agent for BCW. The social service system deserved its criticism, and the women were justified in their caution, but Coco never had the chance to figure it out for herself. She desperately wanted to get discharged from Thorpe House, and also to avoid sharing the news of her pregnancy with the nuns. By June 1994, she was in what she called a fighting mood—looking for trouble to relieve the stress. She could always tell she was about to “mess up” when her hands started shaking.

The chance to fight was one ghetto opportunity that was both constant and encouraged, but Coco usually avoided it; she didn’t want to fight in front of her kids. Now, however, Coco was ready, and she exchanged heated words with a girl at Thorpe who was pregnant as well. When the insults erupted into a physical fight, Mercedes

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