By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

MEXICO – Kimmy Money earns $600 a month working nights at a gas station in Peru. More than half of that goes to pay for her car. She bought it when she had a better, full-time job, when she was living at home, and when she wasn’t a mom.

The 22-year-old had Evan seven months ago.

Kimmy moved out on her own when she found out she was pregnant, setting up in a two-bedroom apartment. Friends and family gave her almost everything, from a microwave cart to a little TV with lousy reception.

When she bought the 1998 Toyota Corolla two years ago, she didn’t imagine she’d be so poor. She owes more than she could likely get for it.

In Maine, a state beset with lower-than-average incomes, one-third of welfare recipients have jobs and still can’t make ends meet. Kimmy is one of them.

Her situation – hardly unique – is a complicated knot of choices.

Give up the car, ruin her credit, or get saddled with something less reliable.

Find a daytime job, lose her nearly free baby sitter.

Work more hours, get less state help.

Move to a big city, leave behind the family, friends and church that make raising Evan alone possible.

“I always look at the paper, not that I’m not happy at my job, but something in an office, something with better pay would be nice. When they put a job in the paper around here, a thousand people go for it,” Kimmy said. “Every woman who works in a convenience store in this area is applying.”

A young woman with long, wavy brown hair and a silver lip ring, she’s got definite ideas about the fields she doesn’t want to enter (health care, social work) and where she’d like her baby to grow up (Dixfield).

“There’s so many people out there who are just like me. I don’t want to live in Lewiston, I don’t want to live in Portland,” she said. “I don’t feel like I should have to leave because the economy here sucks.”

‘No one plans to be destitute’

Since Evan was born, Kimmy has had a near-permanent seat on her living room floor. On a recent visit, Evan lay on his back beside her, kicking at a little play mobile, then rolled over onto his stomach to survey the room.

He loves people, she said. His smile and eyes were open and wide.

“Are you flirting with her?” Kimmy cooed, scooping him up for a kiss.

Evan has begun to creep – a sort of elbows-flailing pre-crawl – and he talks in “eeks” and “ahhs.”

Kimmy’s mom called her the first time he did it. Kimmy was at work. She hated missing that.

She had plans to go to the University of Maine at Fort Kent and study environmental science after graduating from Dirigo High School in 2001.

She got accepted, enrolled. Then half-way through her senior year of high school, her mother, Wanda, got sick. Staying close became more important.

Kimmy tried commuting to the University of Maine at Farmington, but that didn’t work. It was hard to find a parking spot. Her classes weren’t quite right.

Before landing at Blaisdell’s Variety in Peru, she worked for a Lewiston call-in center for a year. She answered phone calls from people applying for credit. Good money, $10 an hour, but the work made her cringe.

“Credit cards are a total rip-off. If you have to call for a credit card, then you are totally screwed,” Kimmy said. The interest rates were great – until people were one day late. Then they spiked.

The lesson she took away: “Layaway at Wal-Mart is the closest I’d come to getting something on credit.”

Kimmy’s household budget is simple. She doesn’t have cable, a cell phone or computer. Every month she gets vouchers for formula and cereal from the Women, Infants and Children’s program, food stamps and $130 through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Subsidized housing pays her entire $786 rent.

A guy – not a friend – once accused her of getting pregnant to “go on the state.”

Christopher St. John, executive director of the Maine Center for Economic Policy, said comments like that highlight how little people understand welfare. His group regularly calculates the wage needed to run a household in Maine.

As Hurricane Katrina unfolded on television with imagines of people stuck and desperate, “I think it’s very difficult for most people who get a paycheck to understand being in a circumstance like that and not having the money for a bottle of water and a night in a hotel room,” St. John said. “Do people want to be in that situation? Do people plan to be? No one plans to be destitute.”

To qualify for state help, he said, some circumstance has already put you at a disadvantage. Help doesn’t erase that disadvantage.

Getting help

Kimmy earns $145 a week working four nights, 4 to 10:30. She and a co-worker alternate: two nights on the register, two nights in the deli.

Her mother and her 16-year-old sister watch Evan.

“We volunteered right away. It’s better to have Grammy’s house,” said Wanda Money. Kimmy goes over almost every day.

Wanda often packs her daughter a dinner to take to work. The mother is still in poor health and has three teenagers at home. The place is a gathering spot. Kimmy says she didn’t want to ruin that atmosphere for her younger brother and sisters by living at home with a baby. Wanda did not disagree.

“You don’t want two women trying to run a household, no matter how close you are,” she said.

Kimmy found the place at Sun Valley Apartments quickly. Friends stayed overnight the first two weeks. She was too anxious alone. The building has different sounds, different ticks. She could hear the neighbors’ low voices.

She took maternity leave last spring by living off her tax return. She was back at work in six weeks.

A tight circle of friends, most of whom graduated together, have rallied around Kimmy and Evan. Two large baby showers gave her three months’ worth of diapers, lotions and clothes, the works.

One friend bought her a vacuum cleaner on Mother’s Day. Another friend’s boyfriend works on the Toyota for free, only charging for parts.

A co-worker gave her a kitchen table. Kimmy hasn’t found sturdy chairs yet by scouting yard sales so she eats on the couch or in bed.

She’s decorated the two-bedroom apartment with huge tapestries and has strung Christmas lights in the bathroom. Evan’s room has pastel lions and giraffes.

Kimmy said she banked the money relatives gave her for Christmas and her birthday. They all told her: “Buy something for the baby, buy something for yourself.” That wasn’t practical, Evan had so many things. The money has paid for new tires and electricity instead.

She recently got a $125 voucher through the ASPIRE program for work clothes. ASPIRE is designed for low-income, single moms, many of whom are working through school.

Kimmy loves to shop the clearance racks. She stretched that voucher into seven or eight tops and several pairs of jeans.

“The ASPIRE lady told me: The most important thing is that you don’t get pregnant again,” Kimmy said. She agreed. “I don’t want to be like that. I want to get off any kind of state help, period.”

Church, Curves and Elmo

Kimmy thinks about going back to school. She doesn’t know what she’d study, and first, she has to pay off debt from that one semester at UMF. The school would like $50 a month; she got a waiver to pay only $15.

“Just not paying it doesn’t look good. If I had more, I would pay more,” she said.

She has two more years left to pay on the car, as well.

Kimmy joined the United Baptist Church of Peru about a year ago. She never feels like she’s being judged for being a single mom, she said. Evan’s father hasn’t been involved in their lives.

In signing up for TANF, the Department of Health and Human Services has stepped in to help her pursue child support. She hasn’t seen any yet. A spokesman said the department is successful in getting support 60 percent of the time.

She hasn’t thought about dating again – “Oh my gosh, I’m still so fat from having him” – but her mom does watch the baby some nights so she can go out with friends.

“It’s a nice break,” Kimmy said.

She’s adamant about not wanting more money for money’s sake. She’s already picked out a gift for Evan for Christmas, a set of Elmo books in an Avon catalog.

“He’s getting one thing for Christmas. I’m not a believer in stuff. I don’t believing gauging how much stuff you have says anything about you other than you spend lots of money,” she said.

In that same catalog, a few months ago, she found a silver locket for $7. She’d wanted one to put her baby’s picture in.

“He’s such a handsome guy,” Kimmy said. You don’t know how hard it was, she said, to fit that tiny picture in there.

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