Holding a family together in hard times

Janean Lindner wakes and watches her boys asleep in a sofa bed a few feet away.

It’s just after 7 on a Thursday in April. Janean, her husband, Stace, and three of their sons have been at the Ayres Suites in Mission Viejo for 16 nights and 17 days.

Despite her efforts, the room is cluttered -- a computer, small television, skateboards, school projects. These are the things that remain.

In the chaos of eviction, Janean became increasingly frantic and they lost nearly everything. At a rushed garage sale, she told buyers to pay what they thought best, believing God would make it fair. She gave most of it away.

Now, in a hotel dominated by business travelers, she is desperate to hold on to what’s left of the family’s middle-class life. Janean, approaching her 42nd birthday, would do almost anything -- apply for any job, accept any gift -- just to hold on a little longer. The worry about what might happen next is relentless. A relative suggested that when everything else is exhausted, the family could always take a tent to nearby O’Neill Park and set up camp in its canyons. Others have done that.

Janean watches 5-year-old Turner grab a video game controller and snuggle back under the covers with Lego Batman. He’ll play until it’s time for kindergarten, four hours later, but she won’t stop him. The game is his anchor.

Trenton, the 13-year-old, wakes up and argues about going to school. Stace trips over books and toys on the floor while he dresses. Trevan, at 4 the youngest, follows his father.

The phone rings. It’s the front desk telling Janean she has a Fed-Ex package. Probably somebody suing us, Janean says. Maybe it’s a gift, the receptionist tells her.

Janean laughs. Maybe.

Maybe God is about to give us a break.

It’s just before 9, and Janean kisses Trenton on the cheek before he leaves with her husband, already two periods late for school. She hands Stace, 46, a stack of envelopes with resumes and thank-you notes to drop at the post office. Since he was injured and stopped working, Janean relies on him to run these errands.

When they’re gone, Janean tidies the room and talks briefly on the phone with her oldest son, Taylor. The 18-year-old moved in with his girlfriend after the eviction. Janean makes the bed, empties the trash and sits at the desk to sort through a stack of bills and job applications. A Penny Saver sits on the desk, an ad circled in pencil.

Mystery shoppers / earn up to $150 a day.

Get PAID to SHOP.

PT / FT. Call Now!

Turner is playing Nintendo. Trevan, more rambunctious than his older brother, is in a corner, digging through plastic boxes, quietly pulling out books and photo albums, pencils, toys, and stickers -- the belongings Janean carefully packed when they were forced out of their three-bedroom home in Rancho Santa Margarita.

Home this day is 500 square feet of cramped generic space. When the sofa bed is open, there is hardly room to walk. Heavy gold curtains block the light and the thick red carpet is worn. The rest is miniature or disposable -- a mini-fridge is too small for a gallon of milk and the coffee pot is just big enough for one cup.

“Who wants to come brush their teeth first?” Janean asks.

The boys ignore her.

“Don’t you want to see if your wiggly tooth will come out?” she asks Turner, and he drops his game and runs to her. Trevan follows closely behind.

When they’re done, Janean puts on her makeup. She teases her hair and sprays it, curls her eyelashes and puts on lip gloss. Her nail polish is chipped. Dark circles rim her eyes. There are days when she wants to crawl under the covers and stay there.

It wasn’t always this way.

When she met Stace 20 years ago, he worked at his father’s butcher shop and had a place of his own, a car and Jet Skis. He had more money than anyone she’d ever known.

A few years after they married, the couple had enough to build a home, a three-bedroom place in Kansas City with a nursery where Janean painted tropical fish on the walls. But they’ve always been wanderers, moving from Texas to Missouri to Pennsylvania and California, on a whim. They’ve never been very good at saving.

None of that mattered much, especially after Stace learned to remodel kitchens and bathrooms. They got used to living on $4,000 a month, sometimes $6,000. When they moved to California in 2004, they rented a two-story, three-bedroom house in a neighborhood where people plan Memorial Day picnics and go to church together.

The good times unraveled quickly, though. They sank their money, time and hopes into a children’s clothing store, and it failed. Then Stace crushed his arm and quit remodeling. Janean hasn’t been able to get a full-time job. Turner, who’s autistic, requires special attention, and Taylor, the oldest son, was in a skateboarding accident last year that produced a pile of medical bills.

For months they struggled to come up with the rent, then stopped trying altogether in December. In February, they were given 30 days to pay up. Right before the deadline, they went to court, hoping to stave off eviction, but were told to clear out in five days. Until then, Janean didn’t believe they’d really have to leave. After that, every day was a little more frenzied.

It was a storm the family hadn’t prepared for. Their life now is one of uncertainty -- with little idea of what the next day, week or month might bring.

--

Later in the afternoon, when Stace comes back from dropping Turner at school, Janean is at the computer, searching Monster.com for jobs: maintenance manager, maintenance technician, apartment maintenance -- jobs that would pay Stace $8, $9, $11 an hour. Many are for positions they’ve already applied for, sometimes more than once, sometimes four or five times.

Stace hands her the Fed-Ex package from the front desk, then sits down on the sofa near Trevan. He pulls his knees up to his chest, rests his chin on his hand and turns on the TV and watches “Handy Manny,” a cartoon handyman who talks to his tools. Trevan, who has a shock of blond hair, laughs as a hammer and wrench dance on the screen. Stace sits silently beside him.

Janean checks her e-mail and finds a message from the mystery shopping company. It says they’ve sent her a check via Fed Ex and asks her to find a local money transfer shop and wait for instructions.

It sounds sketchy, but Janean doesn’t want to over-think things. Lately she’s taken to responding to nearly every ad she sees -- receptionist, secretary, fast-food worker, focus group participant.

She wasn’t built to be the breadwinner. Stace’s work kept the family steady. Janean’s the creative one, the one who sews clothing for the boys and snaps photos at their school events. She’s the one who has wanted to be a mother since she was 5 and who wants nothing more than to stay home with her kids.

Now she’s scrambling.

In a few days, she’ll start pitching healthcare products to friends for a direct marketing company. On the weekends, she works part-time, taking photos of newborns for $10 an hour. But the balance she has to strike between work and state aid is precarious. Every paycheck she earns means the $600 a month they get in short-term cash aid from the state drops.

She opens the Fed-Ex package. There’s a check for $2,864 made out to her, no cover letter, no explanation. She imagines what she could do with the money. It’s enough for two months at the Ayres. It’s enough for first and last month’s rent if they find someone to rent to a family of evictees. She considers cashing it.

--

At 3 p.m., Janean, Stace and Trevan leave the hotel to pick up Trenton and Turner from school. It’s the only time Janean leaves the hotel all day. When they return, Janean and Stace take the boys down to the pool.

Before they arrived here, Turner and Trevan used life jackets. Now they can swim on their own. Stace jumps in with the boys while Janean sits nearby, reading classified ads.

Before the sun sets, the five of them go to the lobby for dinner -- chili cheese dogs served in a room with large windows that open to the hills. After a couple weeks here, the nightly buffets, included in the cost, are starting to lose their charm.

After dinner, they head back upstairs. When the five of them are together, they trip over one another. The boys bicker over who can sit in the room’s only comfortable chair and run around pulling things out of their boxes.

Janean puts Turner and Trevan in the bath then hands them off to Stace, who puts them into their pajamas. Then they tuck into bed and watch “Survivor” until the boys fall asleep. Turner squeezes in with his parents, and Trenton and Trevan lie side by side on the other bed.

Janean returns to her computer after the boys fall asleep and spends a few minutes on a blog she created to tell her story, www.justjanean.com. It’s a way to pass along advice to people in tough situations, to help keep them going.

I have learned what being humbled means, she writes. I have learned to find pleasure in simple things in life and to live without expectations -- therefor there will be no disappointment.

Then she searches online for evidence that the shopping check is legit. She Googles the name of the company and the names on the check, following a trail from a website with the seal of the Better Business Bureau to a New Mexico land company.

When she goes to bed, Stace is already fast asleep.

She lies awake. She knows they can’t stay here forever, but she’d do almost anything to hold on a little longer.

It won’t be until the next morning, after she calls the police for advice, that she learns the check is a fraud.

--

Several days later, Stace began working part time for a contractor, even though his arm was not fully healed. Friends and fellow church members who heard about the family’s situation sent hundreds in donations, money Janean saved in hopes it would someday be enough for a deposit on an apartment.

Toward the end of May -- after spending 58 days in the Ayres Suites -- Janean, Stace and the three boys packed up and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Irvine. A few days after they signed the yearlong contract, Stace’s employer stopped calling.

He’s started picking up odd jobs.

--

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com