Darren glanced into the living room, remembering the photos he’d seen in there.
Joseph at a MAGA rally.
He didn’t want to open an ideological debate, didn’t want to do anything that might close Iris’s mind or stop her from talking. Before she’d pulled out the photographs, he’d gotten her to concede that the only texts she’d seen from her daughter had been on Joseph’s phone, which was right now on his person and therefore not something that Darren could verify. Iris was still deep in her defense of Thornhill, precisely because of the hell their family had gone through before they’d found their way here. Still, Darren felt protective of the former president. “I think the whole point of Obamacare was to get help for people exactly like you. Access to quality care, not being able to lock y’all out of coverage because Sera has a preexisting condition.”
“But we couldn’t afford it, the whole business of the exchange,” Iris said. “It was this big promise and yet we were going deeper into debt every year and Sera falling further and further behind in school because we were trying to ration her medication.”
“I struggled too,” Bell said, setting down a photo of Sera in a homemade Tiana costume for Halloween, a rubber frog like you might find in a bait-and-tackle shop glued onto the shoulder of a pale green nightgown. “Before I got this latest job. But that’s Abbott doing that mess. It’s Texas that played funny with the way the whole deal rolled out in the state, making it harder for poor folks to get help with health coverage.”
It was true, Darren thought.
It was his beloved state that had let down folks like Joseph and Iris Fuller.
Texas had failed Sera.
“Joseph feels like he used us to get elected but wouldn’t let us stand tall, live with dignity like white folks do,” Iris said. “That he wanted to be the only one folks see as special and make the rest of us black folks feel like we’re just a drain on the system.”
Darren couldn’t remember a single Obama speech that had said any of this.
But it was the lived experience of this family, led by a patriarch who appeared to have his own need to feel special, to feel important in this world — which started with at the very least being able to keep your family healthy, well fed, with a place to live.
Joseph was sensitive to Republican messaging about Democrats making working folks feel they weren’t as good as other people. Academics and pundits on television, folks with degrees from states Joseph had never been to. When, out of curiosity, he went to a rally for the Republicans’ 2016 presidential candidate, he’d felt seen as a black man, appreciated even. He talked to people at that rally and other rallies he went to after that, men who wanted to hear what he had to say. “They put him on stage in Fort Worth,” Iris said. “He told his story of what Obamacare had done to our family.”
Greg Abbott, Darren thought.
What Greg Abbott did to your family.
“That’s where he met E. J. Hill.”
“The timber guy?” Bell said.
Darren nodded. “He used to be, yes.”
Bell made a face.
That’s who her brother had worked for, she said, before he got laid off when Hill Lumber Holdings sold to some outfit out of Georgia that had business all over the world. She shook her head at the memory of it. “Lost his health coverage then, was going without for years, not getting regular checkups and then he up and has a stroke.” Bell said it in a way that blamed the Hill family and their company for her brother’s stroke. Which was absurd. Or not. In a country where you got only the kind of health care your employer thought you deserved… or you paid through the nose.
“Same Hill that’s running this place, you realize that, right?” Darren told Bell.
She looked around the Fullers’ well-appointed home, trying to reconcile her dislike for the Hill family with the potential she saw for herself in a town like Thornhill.
“Yeah, but they figured it out now, how to take care of folks,” Bell said.
Iris told them, “It was meeting Carey-Ann that changed everything. She invited us to be a part of a new way of living and working, where everything our family needed would be taken care of. She’s concerned about people, families being protected. She knows most of the people in town by name. Joseph got a job. I’d have to find some kind of work. It’s a condition of living here, that every adult has a job.”
“If you have papers,” Darren muttered.
He remembered Rey’s story of the families without full citizenship who’d been in the community before the Fullers. They’d been the town’s first residents. And then, according to Rey, these families had suddenly gotten sick and left. “Has your family had any health problems?” Darren asked Iris. “I mean, beyond Sera’s sickle cell? My understanding is there’s been some concern about the working conditions making folks sick, whatever’s in the air out here, what y’all are being exposed to.”
Iris crinkled her brow, the lines on her forehead rearranging themselves vertically above the bridge of her nose. She seemed confused by the question and maybe just the tiniest bit frightened. Was there something in the air that could make them sick? Would she end up with two kids in and out of doctors’ offices? She involuntarily coughed. It was the power of suggestion, surely. But it embarrassed her, the momentary lack of faith in the religion of Thornhill. “Our family has thrived here,” she said. “Especially Sera. She was able to start a new medication earlier this year that’s the best she’s been on, and it’s the strongest she’s ever been, the closest she’s ever had to a normal life, especially for a young woman. We’ve started to let her manage her own health care, go to the doctor on her own. And it’s what allowed her to go to college. Thornhill helped with that too, paying for Stephen F. Austin. That was Ms. Carey-Ann’s idea to make education a part of the Thornhill experience. She’s a remarkable woman.”
“We found her medication in the trash too,” Bell said.
“What?” Iris said.
“Lenarix,” Darren said. “My mother found a bottle of pills.”
Iris scrunched her face, confused. “Pills?”
“Prescribed by a doctor out of Thornhill,” Bell said.
“So wherever your daughter is,” Darren said, “she doesn’t have her medicine.”
Iris let out a short, sharp gasp, then covered her mouth with her hand. Panic had finally found her, actual fear. “Oh no,” she said, moaning to herself as she fumbled with her cell phone. “Oh, Sera, my baby, my baby, oh no.” She accidentally dropped the phone on the floor and cursed under her breath as she got up and crossed the room to a yellow wall phone connected to a land line. As she lifted the receiver, they all heard Benny’s voice. “Mom.” He had entered the kitchen. He was leaning against the doorjamb and was playing with the toy construction hat from the man with the red sailboat tie. Flustered, Iris raised her voice when she told her son, “Go to your room.”
“But there are police outside.”
“Police?” Bell said, her voice rising with alarm.
Darren put a calming hand on his mother’s forearm. He had been expecting this ever since the run-in with Carey-Ann Thorn and E. J. Hill. The town’s police force was likely here to again escort him off the premises. He asked Iris about a back door. She shook her head. There wasn’t one. Your life here was a shared community with your fellow workers. There were no private backyards and therefore no need for back doors.
There was a banging at the front of the house.
A frazzled Iris hung up the phone and marched toward her door. Darren reached for her arm and looked directly into her very dark, very worried eyes.
“I’m going to find your daughter,” he said.
She pushed past him into the living room and to the front door beyond.
