Some editor at a magazine was ducking her calls again for a story she’d turned in five months earlier and now the loss of that check—it was quite a substantial amount—left her spiraling into a debt she didn’t know how she’d get out of. She said to me, that night on the phone, “You have to wonder what these mother fuckers would do if somebody just didn’t give them their paycheck for months on end. I mean damn!” We commiserated about not getting paid, and wondered out loud if our colleagues who made the choices not to process our payment ever considered the collateral consequences of not paying a single mother, the way it threatens, in real terms, the quality of our child’s life. “And not even in the big ways,” Raquel continued. “I mean I know why I don’t have health care. I know why sometimes I buy food I normally wouldn’t but we have to have something on the table. I mean I think about the way it affects me psychologically—” “And then what impact that has on our daughters,”
