In July, the Jayneses gave up on returning to their previous home. Robin had a nephew in Paintsville, who told her that the family could come stay in his trailer for a while, so they moved back to town, living in the trailer as they applied for low-income housing. They were placed at the top of the list because of Tim’s status as a veteran, and a two-bedroom apartment in Paintsville quickly became available. It was a privately owned unit and needed a number of repairs before it would be up to code. The Jayneses could move in on September 15th; rent would be just a hundred and five dollars a month. But, before moving in, they would have to pay half a month’s rent and a utility-bill deposit, which they didn’t have.
Robin kept calling the unemployment office to check on her claim. “Getting through to unemployment is like pulling eyeteeth without Novocain,” she said. She was placed in a queue and received robocalls once a week, after work hours, which asked her to confirm her placement on a wait list. More than seventy-five thousand people in Kentucky are in the same boat as Robin and Tim, waiting for unemployment claims to be resolved. The governor’s office pointed me to a statement from its general counsel, Amy Cubbage, to the effect that about eighty per cent of payable claims have been paid—roughly the same proportion as before the pandemic. But far more people have filed claims this year than is typical. (The Kentucky government has spent millions, since June, partnering with Ernst & Young to catch up on the backlog.) Sometimes Robin thought about returning to work; she knew she could get her job back at the dollar store, or at a gas station on Euclid Avenue. But she didn’t want to risk her family’s health.
Cubbage, in her statement, noted that any mistake on an application for unemployment required a “fact-finding” investigation that could slow the process down. One of the things that the government has been investigating is whether people who left work out of fear of contracting the virus did so on explicit orders from their doctors. It had not been clear to many Kentuckians that this would be necessary—the reference to “self-quarantine” at the governor’s press conference, in March, seemed to imply that this was a decision they could make on their own. Some people who applied with that understanding received benefits, only to be asked later to pay back thousands of dollars because their claims had been deemed invalid retroactively. Beshear has said that he was simply following the guidelines provided by the federal government, which, at the beginning of the pandemic, informed states that people who left the workforce to avoid contracting the virus could be covered, but subsequently backtracked. In a statement provided to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, the governor’s office said that Beshear “disagrees with the federal government and believes that individuals can and should qualify on this basis, but Kentucky’s unemployment insurance office is obligated to follow federal law.”
Timmy found it difficult to sleep in his cousins’ trailer, which was often filled with the noise of his cousins and parents talking and arguing and worrying. Like both of his parents, he suffers from anxiety, and he sees a counsellor every week. His father takes anti-anxiety medication; Robin’s nails are often picked down to the nub. As the weeks stretched on, Tim’s tremors got worse, and sometimes his feet and ankles swelled so badly that he could barely stand. “Even to help with her cleaning the apartment, helping make the meals of the day, and stuff like that” was a challenge, he told me, referring to Robin. “I can’t stand long enough to actually do a lot about it.”
One day in August, he woke up at about four in the morning and walked into the kitchen to get a soda. His head was pounding and his breathing became short; his heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. He told Robin that he thought he was having a heart attack. They went to the hospital, where the doctors said he was right and kept him for a couple of days. “Everyone says to calm down, the stress will hurt your heart. It’s easier said than done,” Tim told me. “I can’t help worrying about a lot of stuff. Where are we going to live? I’m not sure we’ll have enough food. I worry about my youngest son. I just wanted to make sure we had a place for my family, what you might call home.” He added, “A little extra income could really help.”
