She sleeps on cushions. Her children share bunk beds. She’s gotten used to keeping their clothes in boxes and buckets in the 22-foot trailer they call home.
Rebekah Denham doesn’t have a working car anymore. And after living in a camper for the last year and a half, Denham knows her family of six probably won’t be leaving anytime soon.
But on Tuesday, she got a surprise.
William Valenzuela – the officer who responded a year and a half ago when Denham and her 14-year-old son got into a fight; the officer who kept coming back to check on them and bring them toys and offer them words of support – told her everyone needed to be there. Valenzuela was vague, but he mentioned the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office and a holiday drive.
Poverty
A little more than 17 percent of Hamilton County residents live below the poverty line, according to census data. The poverty line, a measure of someone’s income level, changes based on the size of the family.
Denham paced the front yard Tuesday morning while a cameraman trained a lens on her property and asked what it is like to raise children without electricity.
It’s hard, Denham said. She was nervous – about everything. The media tromping through her sprawl. The judgment bound to follow. The meanness of people sitting behind their computer screens.
“I mean, yeah, how can I let my kids live like this?” Denham asked as she wiped away a tear. “But what else can I do?”
The mother walked up the hill to their property off Champion Road near Highway 58.
Her children – Jacob, 14; Savannah, 12; Shaun, 9; and Hayleigh, 6 – scrambled around a dirt yard littered with soda cans. The deteriorated home her husband inherited from his grandparents loomed behind piles of wet lumber. A broken-down tractor rusted nearby. Barbie dolls, Lego pieces, and bikes were twisted, buried, abandoned in the dirt.
The 33-year-old mother, who said the family applied for Section 8 housing about three years ago, strode gently across a muddy mat near the trailer entrance. She didn’t want to fall and hurt her back – she still suffers complications from an epidural during Savannah’s birth nearly 13 years ago. She sat on the cushions in the dark and tried to stay positive.
Denham lived in Florida once, for two weeks, when her biological father got arrested, and spent her childhood moving across the country with her mother and stepfather. She landed in Chattanooga, earned her GED, got married, had three kids – then got divorced.
She wound up as a cashier at the Kangaroo gas station in Lookout Valley. In May 2013, a landscaper and Wal-Mart employee named Josh Denham strolled through the door. One day, he left behind his business card and asked her to call. Six months later, they were married.
In the trailer, Hayleigh burst through the door, asking for a snack from the cooler of melted ice outside. That’s where the family stores food – two plastic containers of ranch dressing, a premade Chicken Caesar salad, a tub of butter, some pudding.
Things went south shortly after Denham became unemployed. Around the same time, her husband lost his job at Wal-Mart. When the family was evicted from their place in Lookout Valley, they bought the trailer from Craigslist, moved it to their property, and tried to start a new life in May 2014.
Valenzuela brought the family toys last year and planned to do it again Tuesday. This time, he brought help. While the children played in the front yard Tuesday, Valenzuela, some fellow officers and officials from the Forgotten Child Fund zoomed down Highway 58.
The children heard sirens, distant at first, then closer. Hayleigh screamed. She and Shaun took off down the hill, Savannah close behind.
The cruisers, all flashing red and blue, emerged around the bend. The big man himself, Santa Claus, stepped out of one. Two men hauled a box of toys over.
“You kids must have really been good this year,” Santa Claus said.
“I am beyond humbled, beyond,” Denham said.
When the crowd cleared and the children cut the plastic off of their new bicycles, she was alone again. She moved the toys uphill and into the trailer so they wouldn’t get wet in the rain.
The children went back to playing. The mother went back to waiting. Savannah came up the hill, rolling her bike across the dirt, and stared at the dirt mounds and old toys scattered across the lawn.
“Hey, mom,” she asked, “where are we going to put these?”
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at zpeterson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6347. Follow @zackpeterson918 on Twitter.