If Emma had to describe the next year, it would be nomadic.
Neal's boss pays him a hundred dollars a week under the table, for anything from two afternoons to more than fifty hours.
"That's way under minimum wage"
"What am I going to do, tell on him?"
It's not near enough to get them back out of the car, but it's a cushion. And Neal's boss, who's name it turns out, is Carl, let's him bring Henry when he works.
"Oh yeah, I love kids, just keep him in back away from the stuff".
So Neal hauls out the little pop up playpen from the trunk and tries to teach Henry to stand and walk between learning to use the tattoist tools.
"I do like working there, Carl's really talented. But I hate some of the people who come in, and I don't like having Henry there when they are."
"There's not much else we can do. Day care is really expensive."
It's not just day care. The price of gas skyrockets during the summer, and Neal's pay can only go so far. Diapers, gas, soap, shampoo. WIC is getting thinner. The car is starting to make noises when it goes up inclines. Fruit prices start to rise with the season. More dry, crumbly almost-bad bread for everyone.
Without having to take care of Henry all day, Emma's thrown herself into the task of finding another job.
It's hard. Filling out applications is nearly impossible, so she keeps trying to find somewhere that will give her an interview on the spot. It doesn't go well.
Every single store she visits, she just sees ghost of old management, of old customers. She knows she needs this, but still feels trapped.
The days when its safe, she collects bottles and scrap and turns them in for the deposit. It's a half tank of gas on a tough week.
Her salvation comes at the end of summer. It wasn't even intentional.
It was the kind of late summer sweltering that only Florida could do. The heat that made everything feel like it had been soaked in swamp water, and made the air feel like it weighted a million pounds. The kind of heat that made it seemingly impossible to do anything outside at all that required even the most basic physical movement or intellectual thought.
Emma had, after another attempt to walk down a street, taken refuge in a drug store. It's canned air relieving the humidity induced malaise.
She was standing in the pharmacy section, contemplating whether she could spare the fifty cents to buy an ice cream cone from the kiosk at the front of the store when she sees something out of the corner of her eye.
It's a kid, maybe sixteen years old. Tanned, wearing polo shirt and khakis and carrying a messenger bag. And Emma swears she's seen him walk past this section five times. He's staring straight ahead, not looking down for hardly anything.
She stands on the corner, reading the back of an antacid bottle, until he circles by again.
Emma walks quietly to the pharmacy counter and tells the man working there, "you might want to keep an eye on the kid in red, pretty sure he's trying to rip you off".
She hangs around the counter a while longer. She wants to see.
And sure enough, about ten minutes later, the kid's being escorted to the back of the store by two people with radios.
One of them, a black woman with glasses, stands outside to fill out paperwork and make a phone call.
"What did you catch him with?"
She looks up surprised, "Oh, you're the customer who tipped us off?"
"Yeah, he was acting funny".
"Bag full of Sudafed. He was cherry picking anything off the shelf that had it".
"Knew the kid looked twitchy".
The other woman laughs. "You have a good eye. Ever think of working loss prevention?"
Emma is surprised. "Are you hiring?"
They are, it turns out. The woman, her name turns out to be Kaitlyn, says their single full timer had left to become a private investigator.
"Everyone else who works here is in school and can't commit to full time hours." She tells her. "We were going to end up short, which would mean leaving the store with no one a few hours a day. If you can start right away, we just need to get your background check and drug test, and you can come back and start that day".
Emma spends more than she has in weeks to buy a disposable cell phone she that she can give them a phone number. It physically hurts her. But it gives her something light in her gut when she leaves to get Neal and Henry.
She finds them both sitting on the floor of the back room of the tattoo parlor while Carl finishes up his last customer.
"Hey, Emma, watch!"
Neal picks Henry up and sets him on his feet at the edge of a plastic chair. Next, Neal picks up a design he's been working on, for a man who had wanted a forest tattooed on his back. He tilts it a few feet away so Henry can see it. The child stares, in awe, then slowly stars moving his feet, supporting himself with his fingers.
Emma's laugh spills out of her like hot soup.
"He'll be walking on his own soon" Neal says proudly.
Emma looks at the picture. Neal's embellished it, filled the forest with lakes and tiny fireflies, and just the top turrets of a castle that can be seen at the horizon.
Emma thinks before saying, "Are you going to try and convince me that he knows where he came from?"
"I think he just likes the pretty colors".
Emma goes for her drug test, grateful that she never fell for that vice. Her background check checks out, and she breathes a sigh of relief. She's assigned a radio, a pair of cuffs, and learns the layout of the store.
"They don't even have security cameras there," she grouses to Neal during a dinner of peanut butter on day old bagels and the last of a can of fruit cocktail, "You have to walk around and try to watch everyone. And there are all these things you have to check off before you can stop someone".
"We probably ran into more than a few places like that".
Emma shakes her head.
"Most people aren't even trying. This woman today tried to shove a hair dryer down the front of her sweater and run. A hair dryer!".
It's true, she does sometimes feel like a hypocrite. She had been shoplifting since she was eleven, and lived off of it for some time.
But easily 90% of the people she detains aren't worth the pity.
Tons of teenagers looking for a thrill. The store isn't in an especially high price area, but its always things like candy or makeup.
Tweakers in the pharmacy, older guys in the camera area who are obviously going to sell what they grab.
Women with strollers are the worst. Whether there's a kid or not, Emma has seen plenty slip items into the bottom of the stroller. She's seen them make older kids slip things in their backpacks. It makes her blood boil every time.
But it's a full time job, even with low pay. And every little bit helps.
When they've finally saved enough to move out of the car, Henry's walking uncertainly, and just starting to talk.
Emma is actually a bit jealous that "dada" came out first.
The only place they can afford is a two room shack- more of a shed really- on the corner of the property of a trailer part. There's a stove with half of a working burner, but no refrigerator. There is no bathroom- they use the communal one a couple hundred yards away.
Most of the people at the park are nice, but there's a few who tip off Emma's radar. She can't put her finger on it, but it just makes her uneasy.
But it's stable, and Neal likes having other families around. He says it reminds him of where he grew up, just without people hating them, and that it's good for Henry to have other children around. A couple of the families are Cuban, and some of Henry's first words end up being in Spanish.
After Christmas though, Neal notices one of the guys from a few trailers over watching them.
"Do you know him? I don't."
Emma glances out of the corner of her eye.
"There's something familiar, but I can't put my finger on it".
The guy stays there, and doesn't move.
The next day at work, it clicks.
She tells Kaitlyn that she's taking her break early and uses the store phone to call Neal at work.
"Neal, I remember where I've seen him. Last week a cashier called me and a manager over to check up on a suspicious transaction. Suspected credit card fraud. He had a bunch of cards with his name, but when scanned another one came up. He bolted before we could call the cops, but I got his license and could identify him".
"Shit".
"Come pick me up after work?"
Emma's in full on panic mode for the next several weeks. Her heart rate constantly pounded. Constantly looking over her shoulder. It got bad enough that even Henry climbing into her lap made her jump out of her skin.
She moves her knife from her boot to her pocket. She starts carring a length of chain in her other pocket.
Carl lets them stay on his couch for a few weeks after it happens. Neal goes back to the park late at night to get their stuff, and talk to the guy in the office. There was never a lease, so there's nothing to break.
They manage to never see that guy again.
They stay with Carl for as long as Emma feels they can without being rude. They're back in the car for a few days before one of Emma's coworkers tell her that his parents are renting out their basement.
Emma didn't think houses in Florida HAD basements.
It turns out, they usually don't. And there is a reason why.
The place is damn as hell. There's only one small window in the corner. They can't keep anything on the floor that might get water damaged. And there is less than no privacy. With Henry walking, its worse than the car was. They're not supposed to use the washer and dryer. They can only use the kitchen occasionally, so it's back to eating out of the cooler most of the time. There are no beds or cots, so they get on with piles of blankets until they save enough for sleeping bags.
Emma wonders if the damp air could be bad for Henry. He's still awfully small, even if the doctor insists he's perfectly healthy.
In spring, Carl declares that he's taught Neal all he can, and offers to let him take appointments of his own. His pay increases dramatically, and he ends up making almost as much as Emma does. He's good, and starts gaining a reputation.
"He keeps telling me that I should expand. I think he knows I don't want to tattoo people for the rest of my life. I mentioned maybe wanting to go to art school, and then he started muttering about fascists again".
"There's a community college in the middle of town, we could save and you could start taking classes there when we have enough".
"You need an social security number to register" Neal replies grimly.
Together, they make enough that they could probably afford their own apartment again. A shitty one, sure, but one of their own.
Then the little crises start piling up.
In spring, Neal gets a toothache that doesn't go away. He insists he's fine, but the longer it lasts, the grouchier he gets. When his cheek starts to swell, Emma calls around town. She finds a dentist who offers to look at it for free, and to pull it for $100 if they can pay cash.
Once she manages to gather that amount up (taking a couple shifts from a coworker), she lays down an ultimatum.
"Neal, either you go to the appointment I made, or I am going to get you drunk and pull the damn thing out myself with a pair of pliers".
He calls her bluff at first, but when she produces the pliers they keep in the trunk of the car and a half bottle of vodka they took off a kid they detained that day, he relents.
Emma's glad. She's not sure she would have been able to do it.
Later in the summer, Emma's glasses fall off and break. She can't see well enough to work without them.
When she goes to the store and finds out what a new pair would cost without insurance, she actually cries.
The sales guy takes pity on her, and tells her a trick. She buys an old pair of glasses at a yard sale, and they punch out the lenses and replace them with newly made ones. She's missed four shifts at work.
They still can't afford next month's power bill, and it gets cut off for a few days.
When Henry's second birthday gets close, he starts getting lots of ear infections. Full on, red faced crying and pulling at his ears until at one point they bled. After four rounds of antibiotics, the doctor at the clinic says he needs surgery to have tubes put in to drain fluid.
When she realizes how much the surgery would have cost were her and Henry not on state insurance, is the closest Emma has ever come to considering returning to her criminal roots.
But Henry tolerates the surgery well, and afterwards the abject misery the infections caused is gone.
That year really isn't all bad though.
The Christmas before they leave the trailer park, Emma buys Neal a set of oil pastels. Soon, he has managed to create enough drawings with the soft, blended colors that they could practically wallpaper with them. The dampness of the basement makes them smear, but when she goes back to the craft store, the sales woman gives her a cheap bottle of something that she says should make them stick.
It's like Neal's in another world when he's drawing. He barely looks up from the paper.
One day, Emma finds him drawing a dark haired woman with wings and a blue dress.
"Friend from home?" She asks, voice bordering on teasing, but also not.
"Not sure if I would call her a friend, but she is the reason I'm here".
"A fairy?"
"She said she could send me and my dad to a land without magic, a land where we could start over. It didn't quite work that way".
It still doesn't feel like a lie.
Henry is growing into an almost shockingly easy child too. Quiet, affectionate, easy to please. On his second birthday, Emma buys them a little chocolate cake and a jug of lemonade, and they go to the park and put two candles in it, and Henry gets more of it on his face than in his mouth, but its still the best damn day Emma's had in years.
He's inherited his father's love of books too. Every week, Neal comes home from the library with a huge stack of picture books that the two of them tear through them on top of Henry's sleeping bag. He loves fairy tales and fantasy- dragons and mermaids and princesses in towers. Neal reads him as many as he can find, even if he always gets this strange, far-away look on his face.
The Christmas after Emma turns twenty one, they find their own place again.
It's not nice, not by a long shot.
The paint is peeling from the walls. The shower never seems to get hot. The toilet clogs so often Neal buys a bucket, a huge plunger, a long stick and this weird coil of wire the guy at the store had called a snake that they keep handy. The one bedroom might as well be a closet.
It's still theirs though. And the crises seem to have ceased.
They give Henry the one bedroom, section off part of the living room with a hanging bed sheet as their own.
The first night, with Henry sleeping soundly, they get a chance to make love in peace for the first time in what seems like forever.
After, with Neal still resting atop her, face pressed into the crook of her neck, he whispers,
"I'm still going to marry you".
Emma snorts. "You better. If you left me behind after all of this, I would seriously think you were mentally deranged".