Name: Waiting for the Help That Was Promised in Eastern Kentucky
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Waiting for the Help That Was Promised in Eastern Kentucky

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Robin Jaynes, who’s forty-five, was born and raised in Magoffin County, in eastern Kentucky. Not quite a decade ago, her third husband, Tim, was forced to retire, and Robin, who spent much of her twenties and thirties raising six children, began looking for a job. Tim grew up at the head of a holler in neighboring Johnson County, near the West Virginia border, and served for fifteen years in the Army, until he was honorably discharged, in 1993, after developing a tremor, and he went to work at Family Dollar. He started seeing Robin ten years later, and they had a son, Timmy, in 2006. After eighteen years of twelve- and thirteen-hour workdays, Tim had a minor heart attack on the job, in 2011, the culmination of medical problems—high blood pressure, high cholesterol—that had dogged him for years. A doctor recommended that he apply for disability and supplemental security income (S.S.I.), which he did, reluctantly. “I liked working,” he told me. “I worked there until literally they had to call an ambulance and take me out. That’s when I had to give it up, and then she started,” he said, referring to his wife.Robin worked at fast-food places for a while, Burger King and K.F.C. and Wendy’s. The customers were often rude, she said, but those jobs paid the rent for the family’s subsidized three-bedroom apartment. By 2016, her three oldest children had moved out, and Robin decided that she and Tim and the three younger kids should move to a two-bedroom place owned by the Highland Church of Christ in Paintsville, which would save them eighty dollars a month. Robin became a member of the church, though she worked too much to get to services often. The apartment, she told me, was a little small for two parents and three kids, “but we got them a bunk-bed set, and the oldest one had a twin-sized bed, so it worked out.” She took a job as a cashier at Dollar General, which paid her seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. She worked her way up to assistant manager, organizing the shelves and handling customers and making sure the two cash registers didn’t break down the way they used to. Her hourly pay went up to ten dollars and ten cents. Tim’s total fixed income usually amounted to eight hundred dollars a month.Last year, the Jayneses moved to Indiana to be closer to Robin’s mother’s side of the family, but they returned shortly after having a fight with her brother. The church rented their apartment back to them, at the same rate, but all the moving had used up the family savings, and they fell behind on rent. Robin returned to Dollar General and started paying off the debt, which had grown to a couple thousand dollars, little by little. Standing all day can be difficult for Robin, who has asthma and the beginnings of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She usually worked between forty and fifty hours a week.When the started making the local news, in March, there was skepticism in the area about how serious it really was. Johnson County didn’t have any yet. Still, by the end of the month, some people had begun preparing for the worst. In one day at Dollar General, Robin cleared nearly ten thousand dollars in sales, more than she’d ever seen. All the sales were rung up by four employees at two cash registers, serving a swarm of customers, many of whom, Robin said, weren’t wearing masks. (She wore one.) “I had to be there at seven-thirty to have the store opened by eight,” she said. “I went home around two o’clock that day. I ate, drunk me another cup of coffee or two so I could try to stay awake at work, and relaxed, but then had to be back in there at four and work four to ten-thirty.” Her asthma started acting up, and she often felt like she was suffocating.Meanwhile, Tim’s doctors became worried about his health. He’s fifty-eight, and, since retiring, he’s had a stroke and another small heart attack and has developed diabetes. In April, the Jayneses received a stimulus check of seventeen hundred dollars, as part of the CARES Act, and Robin used it to pay off a chunk of their debt on the apartment and to cover the monthly payment on their truck. She also used a couple hundred dollars to buy a video game for Timmy, who’s fourteen, and treated the family to an outing and some nice food. She figured they still had money coming in, and she could pay down their debt over time. But, in May, Kentucky started seeing a hundred to two hundred new confirmed cases of the coronavirus every day. The virus began showing up in Johnson County. Tim’s doctor sat the couple down. “You know, your wife is taking a big risk bringing this in on you,” Robin remembers the doctor saying. “And if you catch it, it’s deadly.”So, on May 27th, Robin quit her job and filed for unemployment. She knew that if she didn’t keep up with her rent, and what she owed, the church might evict her. But, in addition to the risks for Tim, she had to think about Timmy, who has a weak immune system and is considered high risk for severe symptoms if he were to contract the virus. Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, had said, at a press conference in March, that unemployment would be expanded to cover “anyone who has had to leave their job because of quarantine,” and he had displayed an explanatory slide showing that benefits would be available to people who left jobs due to a “reasonable risk of exposure (self-quarantine).” Robin received a letter from the state’s Office of Unemployment Insurance confirming that she was eligible to file a claim for a hundred and twenty dollars a week, plus the federal supplement of six hundred dollars a week, and an employee at the office said that she would qualify for a time period starting on May 31st.But when June rolled around, the unemployment money had not yet come, and the Jayneses were still short on rent. The church gave them three days to leave. “The only thing that I could think of was we’ll just have to go stay with my daughter,” Robin said. She was referring to her eldest, Christina, who lives in Pikeville, an hour away, in public housing, with her husband and three children. “I said, ‘Sis, we don’t have no other choice but to put everything in storage and come up there and be with you.’ And she didn’t hesitate. She said that her and her husband would come and help us.” A week after Robin had left her job, in the middle of a pandemic, her family was homeless.Alongside the stimulus checks and supplemental unemployment insurance, the CARES Act provided a hundred-and-twenty-day moratorium on evictions for people living in federally assisted housing or in properties with federally backed mortgage loans. Some states, including Kentucky, expanded the moratorium to all renters. But, in May, Beshear clarified that it only covered evictions for nonpayment of rent; landlords could still evict tenants for other causes. Adrienne Bush, the director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, told me that she began getting panicked phone calls from tenants who didn’t understand what their rights were. One tenant said that she’d been served an eviction notice for nonpayment but that, in court a month later, the landlord claimed the reason was other lease violations. Some landlords chose not to renew leases for tenants who were behind on rent, which provided another path to eviction. “If a landlord is frustrated for nonpayment of rent, they can, most of the time, find another reason for eviction,” Bush told me.One of the calls Bush received was from Robin, though all she could do was refer her to local services, such as Mountain Comprehensive Care Center, which provides temporary rental assistance for low-income and homeless Kentuckians. Robin left three messages with them but didn’t hear back, she told me. “I called everyone,” she said. “And nobody could help.” The Social Security Administration sent Tim a letter stating that the food and shelter his family was receiving at Christina’s house were valued at two hundred and sixty-one dollars a month, and so that amount would be subtracted from his S.S.I. check, leaving him with a monthly payment of just twenty-six dollars. And he wasn’t going to get that twenty-six dollars, either: it would be kept to cover overpayments from previous months’ checks. Tim’s disability check would remain the same: five hundred and sixteen dollars, which the Jayneses used for gas, car insurance, a storage unit, and the phone bill. Their SNAP benefits, also around five hundred dollars a month, paid for food, though they had to cut back a bit; Robin started buying cheaper things that wouldn’t take up too much space in her daughter’s refrigerator. Robin had put most of their furniture and appliances in storage, but she kept their deep freezer, which was stuffed with meat, in case they started going hungry.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 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, with Ernst &amp; 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 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 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.”As September 15th, their move-in date, approached, they still didn’t have money for the deposit, which was about two hundred dollars. So Robin called her old manager at the dollar store and explained what was going on. Her manager loaned her the money. “Just because I don’t work at the dollar store anymore, we’re still family,” Robin said. She repaid her manager by borrowing from her brother. It was another couple of weeks before they could find the money to pay for Internet at the new place; Timmy fell behind in his classes. Still, having a home changed everything.“I love it out here,” Robin said, standing on her porch on a sunny and brisk October morning. “It’s quiet. All the neighbors, if you sit outside, they’ll wave and say hi.” Tim, leaning on a pole next to his wife, added, “It’s not a big apartment, but still, for me and her and my youngest son, this is all we need.”They still haven’t heard anything from the unemployment office. Now that they’re paying rent, Tim’s S.S.I. check should start coming again, next month. Until then, they have half a tank of gas to get to Huntington, West Virginia, for Tim’s appointment with his doctor, on the 29th, and, essentially, no money at all. “I may have a dollar and a half in change in my pocket,” Tim told me. “That’s all. I could get you right out here in front and I could take everything out of my pocket and I could show you. And I’m a-laughing about it, and I’m a-smiling about it, but I’m trying not to worry too much about it, because it’s going to cause me major issues if I do. I think about it every morning when I get up.” When the Jayneses are able to buy gas again, they’ll be able to move the rest of their furniture out of the storage unit, which will save them ninety-five dollars a month. For now, as the weather gets colder and the leaves turn red, they’ll be at home, waiting. is a writer for National Geographic. He lives in Kentucky.Sign up for our daily newsletter and get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.Read More

Robin Jaynes, who’s forty-five, was born and raised in Magoffin County, in eastern Kentucky. Not quite a decade ago, her third husband, Tim, was forced to retire, and Robin, who spent much of her twenties and thirties raising six children, began looking for a job. Tim grew up at the head of a holler in neighboring Johnson County, near the West Virginia border, and served for fifteen years in the Army, until he was honorably discharged, in 1993, after developing a tremor, and he went to work at Family Dollar. He started seeing Robin ten years later, and they had a son, Timmy, in 2006. After...

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Writer at @natgeo ... other stories for @nytimes @npr @atlasobscura ... if you have a good story, especially about rural places, send to oliver.h.whang@natgeo.com

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Waiting for the Help That Was Promised in Eastern Kentucky

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