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light. “Get dressed.”
    “C’mon, Ange,” he whined. “It’s my day off.”
    “You’ve got more days off than you work lately,” she shot back. “They cut your hours at the prison, remember? And we aren’t making ends meet, remember?” She picked up dog toys and tossed them into the corner.
    “That’s not my fault.”
    “Did I say it was? Besides, it doesn’t make any difference—it is what it is.”
    “You could get a job,” he groused.
    “Which is exactly what I’m doing,” Angie said as she pulled a pile of old newspapers out from under the coffee table. “I take care of people, remember? You and Zach and Tiffany. And it keeps me plenty busy, believe me. But I’m doing what I can to bring in some extra money by taking care of one more person. We get paid to take care of a foster kid, remember?”
    Mitch scratched his belly and drained the last of his beer out of the mangled can.
    “Come on,” Angie said, swatting his leg with the newspapers. “We need to impress that social worker.” She checked her watch. “They’ll be here in forty-five minutes. Get up!”
    She hustled the newspapers into the kitchen garbage, and when she got back to the living room, Mitch had disappeared. She disposed ofthe empty beer can, then fluffed the throw pillows and placed them just right to disguise the worst of the stains on the old sofa. She still needed to dust, vacuum, and spray some of that air freshener, but then the living room would be finished. At least it would be if Pepper didn’t track in a bunch of the rotting leaves that Mitch hadn’t bothered to rake up from the yard. Too bad she hadn’t had time to give the dog a bath—if he came in wet, the old cocker spaniel would smell pretty rank.
    Angie turned on the vacuum cleaner and was just starting to run it around the living room when Mitch came downstairs dressed in his ragged Warwick High School letterman sweater and a pair of jeans that were at least clean, if almost as worn as the old sweater. “I’m going to watch the game down at O’Malley’s,” he said. “Got any money?”
    Angie had just been to the grocery store, and all that was left in her purse was twenty dollars that was supposed to serve as the kids’ lunch money for the week. Still, better to have Mitch out of the house when the social worker arrived, even if it meant spending the kids’ lunch money on beer at the local tavern. “In my purse,” she sighed.
    “Thanks,” he said, riffled through her purse, came up with the cash, and opened the front door, letting a wet and muddy Pepper scurry in as he went out.
    “Noooo!” she moaned, but the storm door had already slammed behind Mitch and he was gone. “Come on, Pepper,” Angie said, gingerly lifting the filthy dog off its feet and taking it into the kitchen. “You stay in here and I’ll clean you up in a couple of minutes.”
    Perspiration dampened the back of her neck, and if she was going to finish cleaning the house—and the dog—she wouldn’t have time to take a shower herself.
    Which meant she had a choice: either the house wouldn’t look or smell as fresh as she wanted or she wouldn’t.
    Abandoning the house in favor of cleaning up herself and the dog, she headed back to the kitchen.
    She’d do what she could for Pepper and herself, and light a vanilla candle just before the social worker was due.
    It wasn’t much, but it might help.
    “Did you hear me, Sarah? That’s the school you’ll be going to. Aren’t you even going to look at it?”
    Kate Williams’s voice jerked Sarah out of the memory of her father’s gray and haggard face as she made her eyes follow her caseworker’s pointing finger. Caseworker, she thought. Where did they get that word? It sounded so … so … she wasn’t quite sure what. Sort of like she wasn’t a real person, but just some papers in a file. Why couldn’t they just call Kate a counselor or something like that? Of course it didn’t really matter, because in a few