The Hundred Story Home Read online

  When Charlie was six years old, his parents settled into a picturesque gray clapboard on two acres of gorgeous gardens in Rye, New York. The first time I visited this childhood home I felt like I had entered the pages of a magazine ad for family nirvana. While I sat in their cozy kitchen, his mom cooked a lavish sit-down dinner from family recipes, his father breezed in and out depositing fresh-picked vegetables, and a golden retriever and two dachshunds wagged for attention at my feet. On the wall next to the dinner table was a framed illustration drawn by a friend depicting Charlie’s family. In it, children played silly games in the driveway, animals ran pleasantly amuck, and his parents were hilariously and lovingly orchestrating the chaos.

  Studying that drawing filled me with a kind of longing I couldn’t quite name. Looking at all that carefree love and laughter spilling out of the characters, I could see the enormity of what my family had lost. The normalcy of Charlie’s home brought me a sense of peace and safety that felt luxurious. It seemed in finding Charlie, I had also found an entire family. Although it was a place I had never been, it felt like I had come home.

  I wanted to study it. Bottle it. Whatever had made that house a home, I was determined Charlie and I would recreate it for our family-to-be.

  Three years after our wedding and three days before my twenty-sixth birthday, our first daughter, Lauren Lindsay, was born, followed seventeen months later by her sister Kailey. We decided one more child would create the perfect family of five, but I had trouble getting pregnant this time, so my ob-gyn ordered an ultrasound to check for a cyst.

  “Yep, there’s two,” said the ultrasound tech, who was not supposed to say anything to patients.

  “Two cysts?” I asked.

  “Two babies!” he said as if I was an idiot.

  “Two babies? I’m not pregnant.”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” he said, “with twins!”

  Fraternal girls, Maddie and Emma, completed our family of six. With the twins born, Lauren and Kailey never needed to play with dolls again. They had live ones. With one sister for each of the older girls, there were endless games and possibilities. Maddie and Emma grew up being dressed up in outlandish costumes, carried precariously on piggyback, and offered potions of twigs, leaves, and mud concocted in the backyard by their older sisters. They were a growing, laughing pack with seemingly one body, eight legs and four hearts. One call—“Laurenkaileyemmamaddie!”—could bring them thundering down the stairs to dinner, a twin dangling from each older sister’s arms.

  Looking at the four of them sometimes caught me off guard. I couldn’t believe they were ours. That we had created this blond bundle of beautiful girls.

  Their antics and giggles began to create in our own home an image like the one on Charlie’s family’s kitchen wall. Now we lived in a picturesque home ourselves, around the corner from Queens College (now Queens University), where my mom had first gone to school and met my dad.

  Charlie and I settled into a rhythm of the daily basics needed to care for a family of six by dividing and conquering the duties. Although I chose to stay home, I didn’t want to give up on a career, so I started a graphic-design business out of our house, designing logos and brochures during naptime or after the girls went to bed. We used plenty of babysitters, but I wanted to be the one they came home to after school. I wanted to be there to ask them about their day. I promised myself our house would never break. It would be like the “before” in my childhood home. I would keep my girls safe, and we would be whole always.

  I remembered how Gigi had so easily curled up with me on the couch to hear my problems. It was the most natural thing in the world for her to listen and love me and my sisters. But I realized it was very hard for me to do the same. I just wanted to fix things for my girls so they never had to cry or feel sad. Watching one of my daughters feel pain was agonizing to me. I had no idea that being a mother would be so heart-wrenching.

  Maddie and Emma had been born six weeks prematurely, with Emma coming in a little over six pounds and Maddie barely registering five pounds. While Emma was a chubby little baby, Maddie remained much skinnier and smaller than her sister. At first, we weren’t concerned because Maddie was achieving every developmental milestone before Emma—smiling, standing, crawling. She was a tiny bundle of energy who never sat still and hated to nap. When she finally fell asleep at night, hers was a pass-out slumber like someone had pulled her power cord. But at their nine-month checkup, Maddie weighed only fourteen pounds and the pediatrician was alarmed.

  “She is meeting the criteria for failure-to-thrive syndrome,” he told me after consulting her chart.

  We’d been watching Maddie carefully ever since her doctor had noticed something unusual with her heartbeat at her sixth-month visit. He held the stethoscope to my ear and said, “You hear that? That soft murmur?” he asked.

  I put the ear pieces in and listened. There was a distinct but faint whoosh accompanying Maddie’s heartbeat. He put the end of the stethoscope on Emma’s chest, and I listened to hers. Only a strong, solid beating could be heard in her chubby chest as she grabbed the end of the stethoscope and tried to chew on it.

  “I am pretty sure Maddie has a hole in her heart,” he said.

  The technical term we’d learn was atrial septal defect (ASD). A “hole” in the wall separated the top two chambers of Maddie’s heart. Babies are born with this opening, and it is supposed to close within weeks or months after birth. If it remains open and is small, it won’t cause symptoms. But the larger the hole, the harder the heart and lungs have to work to repump blood that is flowing the wrong way.

  “Maddie is basically running a marathon sitting still,” he explained.

  A consult with a cardiologist confirmed our pediatrician’s diagnosis. “I’m afraid she is going to need open-heart surgery.” Maddie was nine months old.

  While open-heart surgery sounded terrifying to Charlie and me, the doctors were confident in this routine cardiac surgery, calling it the “appendectomy of the heart world.” But the fact was, they would be opening the chest of our tiny baby girl, stopping her heart, making the repair, and closing her back up.

  Maddie would have two scars—one the entire length of her chest and a smaller one from the drainage tubes. She could live with the scars, but I wasn’t sure how I could live without Maddie. If this didn’t go well, how could I ever look at Emma and not think of her other half? How does any mother survive the loss of a child?

  In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I worried incessantly.

  “You might try some prayer,” Dad suggested on the phone.

  “I wish I thought that would work, Dad, but I don’t,” I told him.

  “I know. I wish you did too,” he said. “I’ll try some for you.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I’m just not sure God listens.”

  “You’ll see someday,” he said. “You may not think he does, but I absolutely believe it’s true. God might not send you exactly what you expect, but he’s always with you.”

  God must have heard Dad because Maddie’s surgery was successful. By day three she was sitting up eating pancakes with her fingers, and on day four she was discharged. As a toddler, Maddie would proudly point to her tummy and call her scar her “stripe.” Her energy level continued to be exuberant as well, so Charlie nicknamed her Tigger. Three months after her open-heart surgery, we celebrated Maddie and Emma’s first birthday. Our family of six was whole once again. Our four girls squished together in the kitchen as I brought out a zebra cake, Charlie’s favorite, made with thin chocolate cookies covered in whipped cream and refrigerated into gooey goodness. The twins wriggled and giggled, unable to blow out their candles, so Lauren and Kailey did it for them while the younger sisters watched wide-eyed.

  No one needed to make a wish; so many had already come true.

  six

  SOUP AND SALVATION

  Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisibl
e to the eyes.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry1

  Being a mom myself and seeing how difficult it was to respond to all the needs and emotions of girls began to soften the stone in my heart toward my own mother. It was humbling to realize just how difficult it was to be a mom with a working, albeit sleep-deprived, brain, much less one battling depression and mania.

  I thought about how my parents had worked to do things in the community even while raising three daughters and struggling with Mom’s chronic illness. Throughout it all Dad had volunteered, served in the church, and run his legal practice.

  Charlie worked as an investment wealth manager, so he worried constantly about how we would afford four kids and how we could plan for their futures. I worried constantly about how we would raise four good kids. How I would teach the two commandments I learned from my family: Do Good, and Love Well.

  Church was not a place I wanted to revisit with our girls. All those hours spent trying to sit still in the pew were merely the price I had to pay to be rewarded at Gigi’s dinner table. I never felt like the sermons were meant for me and certainly did not believe church had molded any part of my character. Now that I had a choice, I was not going to force religion on our daughters. Charlie and I felt in control of our own fate, working hard to be self-reliant to get what we needed.

  No outside prayers required.

  But Charlotte is a city where it is easier to opt in to religion than to opt out. Charlotte is sometimes called “The City of Churches” because a house of faith is on nearly every corner. Even today most stores open only after 1:00 p.m. on Sundays because sales are too slow until churches let out.

  The most Christian thing our family did on Sundays was go swimming at the YMCA indoor pool.

  One day while juggling four towels and the twins’ floaties, our little wet herd was leaving the Y when Lauren stopped to study a framed portrait by the front door. She asked earnestly, “Mommy, who’s that man?”

  It was Jesus.

  My parents and grandparents would have been horrified to hear her question. In an effort to ensure our daughters could at least name this iconic biblical figure, we began attending a church: First Presbyterian Church of Charlotte.

  We’d been going only a few months when I was reminded of one reason I had abandoned organized religion—getting dressed. My mom would have had my daughters decked out with perfectly combed hair tied with ribbons, matching smocked dresses, and tights with no holes.

  I was struggling to get my four daughters into shoes. Inevitably, by the time I had wrestled all four into their Sunday best, there wasn’t a sermon anywhere that could save me from this weekly fashion exhaustion.

  But a small ad in the church bulletin offered divine inspiration:

  Volunteers needed for the First Presbyterian soup kitchen team! Every fourth Sunday morning, all ages welcome!

  Contact the Volunteer Coordinator Office.

  Finally a place where we could do good and not have to look good. I signed up our family to work one Sunday a month from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The volunteer coordinator told me we would be helping at Charlotte’s Urban Ministry Center (UMC), which served the homeless. Our duties would include preparing soup in the thirty-gallon pot, making hundreds of sandwiches, and then serving lunch.

  We piled into the minivan that first Sunday and followed the directions to the ministry center. As we turned off the interstate, we saw a hundred yards of street ahead leading directly into a chain-link fence. There was no building that we could see, just dozens of people standing, sitting, even sleeping on the sidewalk. As we pulled closer, we could see signage on an old train depot that had been converted to the city’s outreach center for the homeless.

  The UMC opened its gates in the parking lot at 8:00 a.m., but dozens of people lugging possessions on their backs were already waiting to be let inside. Faces were hidden under gray hoods, and their ages and genders were impossible to tell.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Charlie asked.

  In answering the ad in the church bulletin, I had expected a feel-good family-volunteer opportunity. The girls had never seen extreme poverty so up close and personal. Charlie pulled the car forward slowly so as not to hit one of the many bodies spilling over the sidewalks. I was nervous. It felt mildly dangerous and reckless to be bringing our girls here.

  An effusive woman with frosted gray hair and red lips met us at the front door of the depot.

  “Hey! Y’all must be the Izard family!” she gushed. “I am Beverly, and this is my husband, Roy!” I recognized them from the few times we had been at First Presbyterian Church.

  We all relaxed a little. Beverly led us into the kitchen where a thirty-gallon soup pot was already simmering with a vegetable stew. Roy wore an apron and was gently stirring a lumpy, bubbling liquid.

  “So what kind is it?” Kailey asked him.

  “All kinds!” he said brightly. “Ever heard of the story Stone Soup? It’s like that. We put in a little bit of everything!”

  We would be serving lunch for anywhere between four and six hundred people. This happened 365 days a year, all food made and served by volunteers. The UMC never missed a day. Over the years there had been ice storms, power outages, even a blizzard or two, but the center was always open from 8:30 to 4:30 every day.

  Homeless people don’t get holidays off, and neither did the center.

  During the weekdays, more volunteers came to help provide services beyond lunch: counseling, showers, laundry, mail. Beverly let us know that our day, the fourth Sunday of the month, was one of the biggest days for lunch crowds because it was at the end of the month when food stamps and incomes ran short.

  Promptly at 11:30, Roy rolled up the steel window cover over the six-foot-long counter separating the dining room from the kitchen. “Come on, girls, let’s go welcome our guests,” he said. “Now everyone who comes today is going to get served no questions asked. And we call everyone Neighbor, just like your neighbor at home.”

  All four girls scooted after him to unlock the door. Roy stood out in the parking lot next to the line and shook hands with a couple of the regulars he recognized. Roy called out down the line, “Y’all bow your heads, and we will say a little blessing.”

  Lauren, Kailey, Emma, and Maddie stood close to his side as he prayed.

  “Dear Lord, bless this food to our use and us to thy service, and make us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen.”

  A chorus of amens rippled down the line.

  As the line started to move through, few spoke but almost all nodded a thank-you. One of the few who tried to engage us was a wild-eyed gentleman who called out, “Hey, pretty girls, how are you?”

  He had matted white hair, a sunburned face, and a Harley-Davidson logo tattooed on the middle of his forehead. He balanced a small boom box, more of a radio really, in one hand as he took his tray with the other.

  Lauren and Kailey stared at him. “Hi. Have a nice day,” Kailey eeked out.

  “You know what my name is, darlin’?” he asked them.

  “Harley?” Kailey guessed.

  “Nope! It’s Chilly. Chilly Willy! Cuz I’m a cool guy! The coolest there is! The coolest you’ll ever meet!”

  By now he had all my girls’ attention as Maddie and Emma ran over to get a closer look. Now that he had a bigger audience, Chilly Willy started hamming it up with a particularly bad rendition of Charlie Daniels Band’s “Long Haired Country Boy,” about getting stoned in the morning and drunk in the afternoon.

  “Thank you, Chilly,” a man interrupted. He had graying hair and a gray mustache, making him look older, but I guessed he was in his late forties. He wore glasses with thick black frames that gave him a serious look, but he joked easily with Chilly Willy. “Let’s save the Grand Ole Opry for another time. We have a line of people here who want to get their lunch.”

  “Hey, Dale!” Chilly gave the man a huge hug and turned to my girls. “This here’s the boss man. I got to do what he says.
He’s a preacher too. Jesus loves you, Dale!”

  “He loves you, too, Chilly; now eat that lunch,” Dale said, as he patted Chilly gently on the back to send him on his way.

  As our family worked to serve the Neighbors their lunch, we were introduced to Dale Mullennix. Dale had been the executive director of the Urban Ministry Center since the day it opened. He had been a minister at a wealthy suburban church in an affluent section of town where we lived until he was asked to take on this job in the early 1990s. Business and faith leaders were working to make the UMC a full-service center for the homeless, not just a kitchen open at lunch. This new mission in the renovated train depot needed a director, and Dale was asked to be the first leader.

  “Thank you all for coming out today!” he said to us, shaking each of our hands. Dale then moved into the dining room, going table to table and greeting most everyone by name.

  “Hey, Rose, how you doing today? Sam, how’s the foot?” Dale said. He handed out hugs and handshakes like everyone was a good friend. I had spent the past few hours safely behind the stainless-steel lunch counter afraid to make eye contact with anyone.

  What if someone asked me for money? Should I give it to them? How did Dale go home and not want to take everyone with him?

  Finally it was time to clean up, and the girls were giddy. “That was so fun, Mom!” Lauren said.