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table in the dining room, where we had not been allowed until now. The wallpaper was a pattern of creeping vines; the tablecloth was starched and spidery lace. The DCFS woman sat with us. Mrs. Wojo was somewhere else, in the kitchen, probably. We were whispering. Mrs. Wojo might be half-blind, but her hearing was supersonic. Kerry said he wanted to see our father.
    â€œWe’re working on that,” the DCFS woman said, in an unnecessarily loud and cheerful voice. “Give us a few days.”
    We didn’t say anything more. We were hemmed in at every turn by adult actions and adult dictates, pronouncements, decisions, decrees. Days and days went by, I don’t know how many. Long enough for the pinkeye to clear up. Long enough for the smell of Mrs. Wojo’s cigarettes to work its way into our clothes. We didn’t know she was paid to feed and house us—I will not say take care of us—until she told us so.
    It was that portion of the evening devoted to television watching. Mrs.Wojo was in her recliner while Kerry and I sat onthe plaid couch with the plastic cover that betrayed any fidgeting. We’d found a pair of hand puppets, a dog and a cow, and sometimes we made the puppets wrestle and beat at each other in silent, furious combat. The television only got three channels and we’d given up on it producing anything interesting. Mrs. Wojo favored movies, elderly dramas about World War II soldiers and the girls they left behind them, or struggles between good and evil played out among cattle ranchers, or deeply unfunny comedies. She couldn’t see much of the screen but she enjoyed following the story line, those dramas of virtue rewarded, of sacrifice and triumph.
    In the breaks between shows she got up to fetch more cigarettes or go to the bathroom or make herself a highball. (She drank, but not catastrophically.) Returning from one of these, she paused and regarded us, shaking her head at whatever she saw in us that was so visibly deficient. “They need to pay me a lot more if they want me to keep taking in strays.”
    She rearranged herself in the recliner. Kerry and I looked at each other. I said, “Who pays you for us? Our dad?”
    Mrs. Wojo laughed and raised her glass to her mouth, turning the rim cloudy with her lipstick. The drinks always put her in a more indulgently communicative mood. “Your daddy? I’m sure he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. The state pays for you. You’re foster children, and I’m your foster mother.”
    â€œNo you aren’t,” I said, uselessly, not knowing what “foster” meant, but certain she wasn’t any kind of mother to us.
    Mrs. Wojo laughed again, and dabbed at her mouth with Kleenex. “Fine. Have it your way.”
    Kerry said, “Does that mean we have to stay here from now on?”
    Her show was starting up, so she waved this away. “You can only stay in foster care until you’re eighteen.”
    It was a lot to think about. No one had explained any of this to us, or if they did, we had not understood, and we didn’t understand now, especially the part about being eighteen. Eighteen! We would never be eighteen! Mrs. Wojo would never let us grow up, go to school, leave the house. She’d use spells and charms and the pure evilness of her nature to keep us small, helpless, captive.
    But it made sense to know that she was paid money for us. How else to explain it? And they didn’t pay her enough, which was why she was always so mad.
    Another television night. The show was one of the ones with dancing, a woman in a twirly skirt, violins, romance of a particularly coy, sick-making variety. Then the show ended and Mrs. Wojo snapped the television off. Getting up from the recliner, she hummed the melody and took a few gliding steps across the carpet. Her eyes were closed and her powdery face tilted upward, smiling in secret reverie. Her striped blouse, still damp in patches