The Charm Offensive. Cari Lynn Webb

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      She tossed the bat aside and dropped to her hands and knees to search for the drain that was somewhere in the middle of the room. She’d replaced the plastic drain cover after it broke several months ago. Soapy water splashed her face. One more hit of cold reality.

      How was she going to fix this? She had to fix this so she could have clean underwear on when she found her father. She needed clean underwear on when she walked into Beth Perkins’s corner cubicle at Pacific Bank and Trust and paid off her loan in full in less than four weeks.

      She would not be defeated by an ancient washing machine or her father.

      She crawled through the suds, skimming her hands over the cement floor, keeping her search for the drain in the forefront of her mind and the panic at bay.

      Sophie had been in the fourth grade when her parents had abandoned her sister and Sophie to their one-room apartment. Sophie had returned from school and found a handwritten note taped to the refrigerator where schoolwork and kids’ drawings should have hung: “If you girls are wise and careful, you can make the groceries last two weeks until we return.”

      Sophie had managed the two weeks without panicking. She’d panicked on day twenty-one when all of the food was gone and her parents still weren’t home. She’d panicked on the twenty-fourth day when Ms. Dormer, her fourth-grade teacher, had knocked on the apartment door after following the girls home from school. She’d been nervous when Ms. Dormer drove her to the pawn shop to sell her mother’s gold necklace to buy the bus tickets from Tahoe City to San Francisco. And she’d worried during the first hour of the bus ride that the authorities would separate her and her sister before they’d arrived at their grandmother’s house. She’d finally contained every molecule of anxiety when her grandmother had stepped out of that fog surrounding the bus station and wrapped one thin arm around Sophie’s small but stubborn shoulders.

      Sophie hadn’t truly panicked since then.

      She refused to panic now. A broken washer had nothing on her past.

      She’d overcome this, too. She had to for another, more important child.