“It’s like seven people in bed together, sharing a very small blanket,” Boggess said. “If you move the blanket over to cover up one person who’s chilly, someone else is going to get cold.”

***

Sprawled across the width of a bare mattress on a recent afternoon, one leg under a blanket that’s coming apart at the seams and one leg out, Cassie was trying to take a nap. But her little girls weren’t having it.

Next to her, one twin was bouncing up and down. “Unnn-gah!” she squealed.

From a crib across the room, twin number two replied with a squawk.

Frandy, Haitian by descent, is a barrel-chested man with long dreads he keeps swept back in a low ponytail. Hearing the noise, he poked his head into the bedroom. “You OK, babe?” he said. He and Cassie can’t afford their own place, so the family of four shares a bedroom in his mother’s apartment in Dorchester. His sister lives in the next room over with his four nieces and nephews.

“I can’t get any sleep with them around,” said Cassie, groggily. “They’ll just go back and forth all afternoon.”

Four chubby little arms reached for Frandy. He scooped the babies up. One laid her dimpled cheek on his shoulder. One laced her fingers through his braids.

Frandy sees his relationship with Cassie’s twins as a second chance at fatherhood. He was 16 when his girlfriend told him, standing in the stairwell of their high school, that she was pregnant. He was scared — scared that he wouldn’t be able to support the baby, scared to tell his mother. Mostly, though, he recalled, “I loved my girlfriend and I thought I was going to be with her forever.”

He wanted to be the kind of father his father wasn’t: present. He quit smoking weed with friends, got a job at Toys “R” Us, and started stuffing his un-cashed paychecks into a piggy bank.

But despite his efforts, the couple called it quits before his daughter was a month old. “We couldn’t stop fighting,” he said. They attempted to co-parent for a few months more, until, one day, Frandy came over to find his baby’s mother with a bulging bruise on her forehead. He attacked the man who was responsible, a mutual friend, and landed himself behind bars for attempted murder. He served 22 months in prison. After he got caught carrying a weapon while on parole, he served an additional three years.

Historically, funding for both government and nonprofit programs to help men has been scarce, said Joy Moses, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. A recent survey from the Center for Family Policy and Practice shows the top two ways that nonprofit service providers connect with men is through parole and child support enforcement programs. “As a low-income man, you almost have to get in trouble to get help,” Moses said.

In prison, Frandy signed up for every program that would take him. He completed his GED and volunteered to speak to at-risk youth “to help others avoid my mistakes.”