The Hundred Story Home Read online

  Leaving our newfound homes, I phoned Dale to tell him the good news about the ideal landlord who had just landed in our midst. Dale was thrilled but not surprised.

  “God works like that,” he said with a laugh.

  Did he? How could Dale be so confident? I remembered my dad and his confidence in prayer leading up to Maddie’s heart surgery.

  God might not send you exactly what you expect, but he’s always with you.

  It felt like this time God had sent exactly what I needed.

  Homeless to Homes finally had homes.

  thirteen

  TRASH AND TREASURE

  It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn’t see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves.

  —Anna Quindlen1

  It had taken almost five months to find those homes, so with all that time to plan, I should have been more than ready. But on Saturday, May 17, 2008, Homeless to Homes inaugural move-in day, I was a wreck. It wasn’t the truck, the boxes, or volunteers I was worried about; it was the four people we were moving in.

  Four lives now on my watch.

  Choosing those lives had been more difficult than I could have imagined. After working at the UMC every day, the Neighbors were no longer just a sea of gray clothes and anonymous faces to me. Now, along with Chilly Willy, I knew many of the Neighbors’ names and bits of their stories. Should we offer a home to Tyrone, who had been homeless since aging out of foster care three years ago? Or should we help Dianne, who was schizophrenic and had cycled in and out of the shelter for the past three years? To accept these two might rule out a spot for Patrick, who had epilepsy. Patrick seemed to always have a bandage on his forehead from falls on the concrete sidewalks when he suffered seizures.

  After weeks of agonizing debate we did not offer Chilly Willy one of the first four apartments, though his story had been the central argument to getting this Housing First program started in Charlotte. Dale, Liz, and Joann agreed Chilly Willy was too unpredictable, and these first four tenants needed to prove that housing could work here just as it did in New York. In the end, we selected three men and one woman the UMC knew well, each at risk of dying on the streets from health issues and each highly motivated to be housed.

  Just as Liz had hoped, Ruth would be the very first woman we would bring home. Along with severe neuropathy in both legs, she was living with uncontrolled diabetes and recently diagnosed gallstones. Joining her would be the other two men Liz and I had talked about on my first day of work. Raymond could finally leave that barn and Samuel would leave the shelter for the first time in over 2,500 nights. Although I had worried about accepting wild-eyed, drinking Jay into the program, he agreed to a twenty-eight-day alcohol treatment program now that he finally had somewhere to call home.

  All four were grateful but skeptical about being offered a place in this new program. They each desperately wanted to come off the streets, but I am not sure any of us understood exactly what we were offering them along with their house keys. Joann would be their case manager, connecting them to services and working as their advocate on medical, mental health, and substance-abuse issues. I would keep expanding the program, finding more apartments to house more tenants. Ultimately, I would be responsible for the success or failure of this idea. In two years I needed to be able to say not only that these four were still housed, but that they were an example of what we could do for hundreds more.

  The logistics for move-in day were easier to organize than this long-term goal, and my yellow legal pad was filled with notes on getting everything accomplished: four apartments—four kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms to stock. Our new tenants owned little beyond clothing, so this move required buying everything from toilet paper to forks to clothes hangers. I had organized a registry at Target, and friends bought bedding and bath and kitchen goods, fully stocking each new home.

  I had drafted Charlie and my girls along with twenty volunteers to serve as the moving crew. The moving truck, loaded with donated furniture items, and each of the new tenants were going to meet us at the apartments. That morning, I was frantically throwing things in my car I thought we’d need. Trash bags. Paper towels. Brooms. Did we need shelf-lining paper? Would they care?

  Lauren watched me, shaking her head. “It’s going to be fine, Mom, really!”

  I pulled out of the driveway. Charlie followed in another car loaded with more boxes along with Kailey, Emma, and Maddie. I was going over a checklist in my head when Lauren reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a CD. She put it in the player and searched for the right song. When I recognized the first few bars, I turned to look at her, my mouth open in astonishment.

  She smiled at me and turned it up. “Perfect, right?”

  The lyrics to “I’m Amazing,” a Keb’ Mo’ song, started playing, and Lauren and I sang along loudly. I had used this song to make a slide show for True Blessings. As the one thousand guests had entered the ballroom, it played as background to photos of the UMC and all the amazing things that happen there. The soccer, the art, the gardening. All the things I had thought were enough. More than enough. Now, today, there would be more. Four people would no longer be homeless.

  I teared up as Lauren and I belted out together with Keb’ Mo’ how grateful we were “for the simple things” that we don’t ever stop to think about.

  I was so grateful for this new path that had unstuck me from my safe world. I had no idea what was ahead, but I knew that today felt amazing.

  No one could stop smiling all day, least of all me. As volunteers helped Raymond, Samuel, Ruth, and Jay move in, it was eye opening how few possessions each owned and how they carried these items to their new homes. No suitcases or boxes. Just green plastic garbage bags holding all they had in the world. Salvaged clothes and shoes, a few toiletries, maybe a wrinkled four-by-six photo. Each new tenant was over forty years old, yet from four decades of living, these few plastic bags were the only evidence of that life.

  Ruth, Raymond, Samuel, and Jay moved through their new homes with disbelief. Mark’s apartments were simple two-bedroom apartments with front doors opening onto a grass lawn. The new tenants kept coming in and out in astonishment.

  “This is my own garden?” Raymond asked. “How about that! I am going to plant me some tomatoes!”

  “Y’all come see my house,” Ruth said, inviting each volunteer.

  “I can’t believe I will be able to watch movies and not have to fight with all the other guys in the shelter.” Samuel shook his head in wonder.

  At bedtime I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. At first, the day’s happy images scrolled in my head like a Disney movie with the Keb’ Mo’ soundtrack playing in the background.

  Raymond marveling at his own bathtub. Samuel opening and closing his refrigerator door. Ruth testing the softness of her couch.

  It really had been a remarkable day.

  Panic woke me at 2:00 a.m. I was used to waking up at night worried about my teenage daughters—were they home? Did they make their curfew? But this night I was wide awake worried about my new family; I now had four new “teenagers” in my life. What if Raymond, unfamiliar with his new stove, had started a fire in Mark’s apartments? What if newly sober Jay was having a party in his apartment? How would I explain that to our donors, the Moores?

  Monday morning I arrived at the UMC full of dread, expecting Joann to fill me in on some horrible happening, but I couldn’t find her. Ruth was in her usual place monitoring the shower counter. She waved at me.

  Ruth never waved at me. She was also smiling, wide awake, and neatly dressed in a clean shirt with a necklace. Necklace? I had never seen Ruth wear a fashion accessory.

  Cautiously, I walked over to talk with her. “Hey, Ruth!”

  She gave me a huge, unprompted, first-time-ever hug. “Kathy!”

  “How were your first two nights?” I asked.

&nb
sp; “Did you see how it rained yesterday?” she asked. I nodded, not sure why that mattered.

  “It rained yesterday and I didn’t get wet!” Ruth marveled.

  I found out there were no parties that weekend, no incidents. Raymond confided he spent the whole weekend filling his bathtub with Mr. Bubbles, soaking until the hot water cooled, then doing it all over again. Looking at the photos from that move-in day, I framed one to keep on my desk. In it, all the move-in volunteers surround Ruth, and her smile is electric. It was a constant reminder that whenever it rains, at least now, Ruth doesn’t get wet. And Raymond gets wet by choice in his own bathtub.

  I made a silent vow to myself that in two years, by 2010, there would be a picture on my desk of dozens more smiling, dry Ruths and freshly showered Raymonds with places to call home.

  The same month I helped move Ruth and her two garbage bags into her home I also moved dozens of garbage bags out of my mom’s house. It had taken over a year, but we had finally sold our childhood home, and Mom was moving into a senior-living community. My sisters and I were certain we were doing the right thing because the maintenance on our four-bedroom home had become overwhelming, but Mom wasn’t convinced.

  In her mind we had just made her homeless.

  I traveled to El Paso early for the clean-up, and my sisters planned to join me for the actual move later in the week. Organizing and sorting were my strengths. Faced with the mounds of possessions stored during forty years in our home, I was sure I could be the most efficient in sorting trash from treasure.

  It was easy to see Mom wasn’t happy about this move she had agreed to months ago. She had promised to begin the process of cleaning out, but as I looked around the kitchen, I could see she had done nothing.

  I sighed, looking at it and wondering how we were going to move and clean it all in the allotted week. Mom admitted, “I just didn’t know where to start.”

  My mom loved this house and everything in it. It had stayed relatively unchanged since 1969. Even the kitchen appliances were still avocado green, because over the years Mom found someone to custom paint when she need a new refrigerator or dishwasher. One of the few things that had changed in our house was my room. Both Allyson’s and Louise’s bedrooms were basically untouched from the time they were thirteen. Dad had turned my room into an office shortly after I was married. As a result, I stayed in one of my sisters’ rooms when I came to visit Mom. It had always bothered me that my room was sacrificed for this purpose. Why not use Louise’s room? She had been out of the house longer than me.

  This visit, the last visit to my childhood home, it mattered even more.

  As I walked around wondering where to begin, it struck me that this house had stopped feeling like my home, my haven, a very long time ago.

  In what used to be my room, the bed under my window had been replaced with a huge wooden desk. Dad’s tennis trophies and accomplishments had been moved from the den to this upstairs office. I wanted to sit in the chair across from Dad’s and tell him about the last few months. About Denver, my new job, about my momentous moving day the week before.

  I am doing something, Dad. I am finally doing something.

  I hoped, somehow, he knew.

  My closet door was open, and I stepped inside. My seventh-grade cheerleading uniform was hanging next to my old tutus and my high school letter jacket. I stepped up on the shelves so I could peer into the secret fort at the top of my closet. My baby pillow was still up there, and Snoopy smiled back at me.

  I felt a wave of homesickness. I reached for Snoopy and brought him down with me to hug his neck. It was time I took him home—to Charlotte. Snoopy accompanied me down to the kitchen to start the serious work of cleaning out. When I opened a cabinet by the telephone, rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon, and bags of cards spilled onto the floor. Here was my mother’s Hallmark addiction. My childhood friend Andrea now owned the card store in El Paso, and my mom was her best customer, shopping there at least twice a week. For each birthday, anniversary, Easter, Mother’s Day, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day, Mom sent a separate card to each of our girls, Charlie, and me. That was about twenty-five cards a year to my family alone. Then there were my sisters, my aunts and uncles and their children, and now their children’s children. There were dozens of bags of cards from Andrea’s store. Mom loved buying extras just in case. She was like a holiday Girl Scout—always ready.

  This habit slightly annoyed me. Why did she spend so much time on it? She spent hours every week buying, writing, and mailing these cards. Her dedication baffled me. I knew she would want to take every card and ribbon to her new home, but I was going to be ruthless. There was no way we were boxing all this and moving it. Mom would just buy it all again anyway.

  Sort. Sift. Save. Discard. Sort. Sift. Save. Discard.

  I got more frustrated as I opened more drawers and cabinets. More Hallmark paraphernalia poured out. Some rolls of wrapping paper were brand new, never opened. Some were half used and bunched. The half-used rolls I stuffed in trash bags, and the brand new I set aside.

  The bags piled up, and I dragged them past Mom to get to the garage.

  “What’s all that?” she said, alarmed.

  “Oh, you know, kitchen junk,” I said vaguely.

  It was amazing to think each tenant in Charlotte had only two bags of treasure, yet I could fill two of those same trash bags in only one room of my mother’s house.

  I moved upstairs to Mom’s bedroom and began cleaning out the bathroom vanity. There were only two drawers, a his and hers. I knew my dad’s things were still in his, even though he had been gone for nine years. I opened hers first expecting to quickly sort, sift, save, and discard the contents. When I opened the drawer, however, my father’s handwriting stared up at me from the corner. It stopped me cold. His neat script was unmistakable. Dad had precise penmanship, always measured and slanting right in even, sure strokes.

  I reached down to touch his handwriting on the top card and then picked up the stack of cards bound with a rubber band. I didn’t count them, but I knew there had to be over thirty cards. They were the standard two-by-three-inch innocuous white cards a florist sends with flowers. In this case I knew a dozen red roses had accompanied each card. The same flower, the same color, and the same dozen my dad had been sending my mom every year on their anniversary, just like he had since college. Each card read: “All my love, Leighton.”

  Each card written by my dad. Each card saved by my mom. For over thirty years.

  I sat down on the stool at my mom’s vanity. Each action was remarkable: that my dad had handwritten each card. Had he driven by the florist before they delivered them? That my dad never wavered and sent the same dozen red roses each year to remind my mom of his steadfast love, even during their most difficult years. That my mom saved each card, now a two-by-three-inch record of their love story.

  Charlie sent me flowers on our anniversary, my birthday, and Mother’s Day, always from my favorite florist. Different arrangements each time—hydrangeas, tulips, roses—different colors and different buds according to the season. I loved that he did that. I loved the surprise of not knowing what would show up on my door, always certain he wouldn’t forget. Charlie’s cards were always different too. They would be typed from the florist with different messages that Charlie dictated over the phone. For our first anniversary: “That wasn’t such a bad year, was it? Love, moi.”

  Or another favorite, harkening back to our first-date story: “You wouldn’t want to have a beer with me, would you? Love, moi.”

  We had over twenty anniversaries now, but I had not saved one of those cards. My girls would never open a drawer and find the witness to our love story. It would be only ours to know. Charlie and I both easily threw things away. Our house was neat and tidy. No stacks of anything anywhere. Looking at the sweet stack my mom had saved, I regretted throwing away Charlie’s cards to me. I regretted some of the other things I had discarded over the years. It made me sad to know I had made someth
ing trash before it had the chance to be treasure.

  I thought about our girls and their future love stories. Would they be romanced by flowers and cards? Or would they only have texts as witness to their stories? They couldn’t say to their kids, “Look at the first text your dad ever sent me.”

  I held the cards in my hand, the thirty years of love radiating from them. I may have had enormous uncertainty in my life growing up. I may have had sadness in never knowing the mom I could have had. But I had always been surrounded by a love that was truly rare. And that love had made this old house a home.

  I carefully placed the cards back in the drawer. Mom would want to pack these herself.

  fourteen

  PRAYING TO A GOD YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN

  Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

  —Eugene O’Neill1

  “Hey, Jay,” I said as he got into my car.

  Jay nodded shyly at me as he fastened his seatbelt. The wild man I used to avoid at the Urban Ministry Center was freshly shaved and wearing a knit shirt. I had never seen Jay this clean or this calm. Before moving in with Homeless to Homes, Jay’s difficulty conversing with others and his struggles with alcoholism had led him to drink to oblivion. Now, after nearly two months of sleep and sobriety, Jay was a serene, grateful passenger in my car. It was difficult to remember this was the same man who would drunkenly shout in the UMC parking lot only months ago.

  Joann had asked me to take Jay to buy groceries. While I was happy to help, I was uncomfortable at the same time. Jay and I didn’t know each other, and this shopping trip was going to stretch the limits of our conversational capabilities. Jay probably would have been fine to ride quietly, but I felt the need to talk in order to break the awkward silence.

  “How’s your place?” I asked.

  “Fine, ma’am,” Jay said with bright eyes that made him look like a happy kid bursting with the best secret. “Real nice.”