Home Fires Page 5

  My family chose to live in Riverton Heights in order to take advantage of good schools and good amenities.

  Let’s keep city problems in the city.

  If you go through with your idea for a hot meal program, you can expect to hear from me again. There are plenty who feel the way I do, and we’re willing to fight for our neighborhood. We’re willing to do pretty much anything to keep you from moving forward.

  Asking you to reconsider (politely, for now),

  Buddy Kreft

  Cyndi’s hands shook as she read the letter. “Is this letter for real?” she asked.

  “Oh, it’s for real,” Mike said. He left his laptop to come read the letter over her shoulder.

  “Well, maybe it’s just a few people. Maybe it’s not as many as he says.”

  “Honey,” Mike said, tucking her stray hairs behind her ear for her, “it’s probably more than he says. Nobody’s going to like us pulling the underbelly of the city into their view. But that doesn’t mean we should stop.”

  “But is it right? I mean, what if my motives are all wrong? What if it’s too much work? What if I can’t pull it off?”

  “Then we go back to life as normal. But for now, I think you need to be faithful to this wacky idea God planted in you.”

  Cyndi fought the heaviness in her heart. She’d been so excited, so eager to run with an idea that seemed to grow legs of its own. She wanted to do something important, but she wasn’t looking to rile up a whole community. “If people are so against it, why haven’t we heard from them?”

  “Well, I guess we have. Some of them, anyway. This isn’t the first letter.”

  “It’s the first one I’ve seen.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. You know how frazzled you get when people are unhappy. And believe me, you don’t do your best work when you’re frazzled.” Mike scratched behind his ear before admitting, “I’ve pocketed a few letters.”

  “How many is a few?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe a dozen or so.”

  “A dozen? A dozen people are mad at me?” She felt a little sick. He was probably right to hide the letters.

  “Chin up, babe,” Mike said. He sat next to her, squeezing a hand for comfort. “If this is a God thing, he’ll work it all out despite angry neighbors. Don’t give up before you even give it a shot.”

  “But what if they’re right? What if I ruin the neighborhood by feeding hungry people? What if I drive away our tenants? What if I fail and we lose our house? What if it’s just a Cyndi thing, not a God thing? Maybe—”

  Mike cut off her rising panic. “We won’t lose the house. It’ll be fine, but you’ve got to hold yourself together.”

  “What if we attract criminals? Drug addicts? Vandals?”

  “You mean those who have lost their way? The needy? I thought that’s who we’re trying to attract. Every group, rich or poor, has its troublemakers. We’ll just have to manage whoever God sends us.”

  Cyndi rested her forehead in the heels of her hands. “Who am I to think I can make a difference? What was I thinking?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the first one to go through this. I’ve been doing some research.” Mike got up, grabbed his laptop, and set it where they could both see the screen. He pulled up a search engine and typed a few words.

  Portland soup kitchen parking.

  He scanned the top results but didn’t find what he was looking for. He typed in different search terms.

  Portland homeless lawsuit.

  Again he scanned the first page of results and came up empty.

  “What are you looking for?” Cyndi asked.

  “Hold on a second. I’ll find it.” Mike typed in a third set of words.

  Portland meals limit.

  This time he whispered an aha and clicked on the top choice. A newspaper article popped up on the screen.

  “Is that what you were looking for?” Cyndi leaned in for a closer look.

  “Yeah, this is it. A few years ago there was a case where a church was hosting meals for the homeless. The neighbors protested and the city shut them down.”

  “Why?”

  “Too many people meeting in the building at once, I think. Here it is. It looks like there were some drunks hanging out around the doors, and it bothered the neighbors. So the city set limits on how many people could meet together at once. The national media jumped all over it. I can’t believe you don’t remember this story.”

  “When was that? 2000? I’ve slept since then. So what happened?”

  “There was a big debate, mostly played out on the news, and the city eventually backed down, I think. Actually, I’m not sure. The story just kind of disappeared after a while. Maybe it got lost in election year coverage or something.”

  “Doesn’t it always work that way? Things like that seem all-important when they’re in the public eye. And then when the media stops feeding us their line, we just forget about it. I’d like to know what happened. Even if the news coverage stopped, you know the problems of the homeless didn’t. I bet a lot of the same people are still hanging out down there.”

  Mike typed something else in the search engine and came up with another story. “Here’s one about a minister in California who was fined a thousand dollars a day for not chasing the homeless off the sidewalk in front of his church.”

  Cyndi whistled. “A thousand a day? We don’t have that kind of fighting power. What happened there?”

  “Looks like it’s still in appeals.”

  “Shoot, honey,” Cyndi said, scratching the back of her neck. “We don’t have that kind of money. We can always back out now before it goes any further.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  It would be so much easier to just forget it. But pictures of the old man lying on the sidewalk with his dog flashed through her head, then images of the girl, Clark, and the old lady down the street. Cyndi’s dreams each night were filled with the faces of these people and others, people she’d met at the soup kitchens and shelters she’d visited while formulating her plans for her own.

  She sighed. “I wish I didn’t care so much about it. I wish I could just say it was a good idea but I’m over it. Only . . . I’m not over it.”

  “What about the money?”

  “We’ve still got some left from Madi’s life insurance.”

  “And the house?”

  “We’ll quit before it gets that far. I’m not as worried about the money as the fight. Whatever anyone says, it’s the right thing to do. This isn’t about the neighborhood. It’s about helping people who can’t help themselves.”

  Mike closed his laptop. “Then we don’t have a choice. We have to do it.”

  Chapter 14

  Cyndi lay in bed, the heavy down comforter pressing her into the mattress. Usually the combination of warmth and snugness pushed her right into sleep. But not tonight.

  Beside her, Mike whistled slightly through his nose every time he exhaled.

  Cyndi turned her back to him. She pulled a pillow over her head to drown him out. After a few minutes, she turned over the other way, then a minute later flopped onto her back with a groan.

  They’d been working like crazy to get the new kitchen ready. For the last several weeks, she had spent every waking moment working on the place. It had a new coat of paint, freshly polished floors, and friendly yellow curtains, courtesy of Amanda Stern down at the craft shop.

  Everything was going so well. Everything but the unexpected onslaught of opinions on Facebook.

  Most people’s comments were so supportive. But then there were the others, the cutting remarks, the veiled threats, the heated debates. It all made her sick to her stomach. She threw the blankets off and swung her feet to the floor.

  She shuffled to the bedroom door. She stubbed her toe on a desk chair. “Ow!” she whispered.

  Mike stirred. “Hmph, what’s wrong?” She could hear him patting her side of the bed. “Where are you going?”


  “I can’t sleep.”

  The blankets rustled. He’d be back asleep within seconds.

  In the kitchen, Cyndi turned off the teakettle when she could hear the water crackling inside. Not that it would wake him anyway. He’d done more physical work in the last three weeks than in the past five years.

  She didn’t need a whole pot of tea, but part of the calming effect of tea was in the ritual. Cyndi reached for her favorite china teapot, the one with roses on it that her mother had brought back from London years ago. She poured loose chamomile leaves in and chased them with water. The pot went on a serving tray, along with blackberry honey, a spoon, a napkin, cup, and saucer.

  She took her tray into the living room and set it on the stand next to her favorite chair. She curled her legs up under her and wrapped herself in Madi’s blanket. Each step helped pull the world into focus.

  The floorboards down the hall creaked. Mike came into the living room, squinting his eyes in the light of the lamp. “Why are you up?” he asked. “I can’t sleep without you.”

  “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. The bed just feels empty. What’s up?” Mike cinched the belt on his ragged terry cloth robe and sat in his recliner.

  “Those comments on Facebook. I feel like I need to answer them or defend what we’re doing. Do you want some tea? It’s chamomile to help you sleep.”

  “No thanks. I was sleeping fine.” Mike screwed up his face. “It’s not nothing. Criticism is hard to take.”

  “Yeah,” Cyndi said. “When we’re down there working, I’m so excited. But when I look at my phone . . . All the negative stuff is killing me. I just want to run a soup kitchen.”

  “Hot meal service program.” He smiled.

  They’d settled on the terminology at the beginning, under the premise that soup kitchen conjured up pictures of the Depression, bums, hoboes, and the like. As if by calling someone a homeless person instead of a bum, they could raise his social status. Or by calling it a hot meal service, they could act like they were running a family restaurant.

  “The problems are real,” Cyndi said. “I don’t have the energy to fight on every front. At this point, vocabulary doesn’t even make the list of things I’m worried about.”

  “I know,” Mike said. “The criticism is hard.”

  She looked at her phone. She could spend her whole life scrolling through unsolicited comments people were posting. “I don’t know if I can do this. If we can’t succeed, I don’t even want to start. I have no intention of offering something to people who need it and yanking it away when things get tough. If we’re doing this, we’re all in.”

  He covered her phone with his hands. “Maybe you shouldn’t be looking at that.” He gently took it from her. “If you’re going to run this kitchen, you need to get off Facebook. It’ll only bring you down. May I?”

  She used to love staying connected with people on social media, but not anymore. The court of public opinion was a hard place to be tried. “Yeah, okay.”

  He pushed a few buttons. “It’s gone.”

  No more Facebook. No more unsolicited comments. Maybe now she could get some sleep.

  Cyndi reached for her tea. She wrapped both hands around it.

  “Seriously, Cyndi. It’s going to be fine.”

  She stifled a yawn. “I’m just worried, that’s all. It’s what I do. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” Especially not her or Mike.

  “You’re tired,” Mike said, reaching out his hand to help her up. “No more Facebook. Let’s get you to bed.”

  Cyndi left her phone by the chair. He was right. There were enough reasons to worry without letting other people’s criticism keep her awake nights.

  Chapter 15

  “Look there, Wolf,” Joe told his dog. “Swimming suits in all the store windows. That’s a sure sign of spring.” The air held the promise of warmer, dryer days ahead, but the damp of winter still hung about Joe’s bones and made him feel older than his sixty-some years. Each year on the streets aged him five.

  “What should we do today?” The winter’s gray clouds hadn’t heard that spring had arrived. They sat stubbornly on the city and refused to move. “Shopping? No? How about a game of chess? Or the library. Yeah? Sounds good to me, too. We can check the computer again.”

  He wasn’t much for Internet, but he did keep his profile updated on Facebook and LinkedIn in case one of his daughters decided to look for him. “Don’t you know if we skipped a week, that’s the week she’d try to find me.” He stashed his shopping cart in the bushes a block or so from the library. A look in the reflective glass of the office building next door told him he still looked homeless, but not frighteningly so. And with only two or three days since his last shower, he wasn’t at his ripest. Not that that ever stopped him from going into public buildings.

  “Morning, Joe,” Janice, one of the librarians, greeted him. “You’re a little late today. Been busy?”

  Joe grunted. He didn’t aim to be predictable but found he fell into weekly routines without even realizing. “Here for the computer.”

  “I’ll need to have your keys or license to secure one for you.”

  She knew what day and time he came in every week but didn’t remember he didn’t have a car?

  “Will my library card do?” Joe asked.

  It did, like always.

  He missed the old microfiche machine with their copied newspaper pages, Polk directories, and old photographs. The Internet was a minefield of information, reliable and not. He didn’t have much use for it and didn’t like to waste time on it except for a few minutes every week. All that jumping around gave him a headache, and all the little words were getting harder to read.

  He googled both his daughters’ names, then his own, but turned up nothing new. He checked his profile pages for messages and looked at a people finder site to see if his daughters had tried tracking him down. Nothing.

  Not surprising. They’d said they never wanted to see him again. It seemed they were serious. Once he’d found a wedding announcement for Deb, his younger girl. A couple of years later, he ran across a birth announcement. The little boy’s face had long worn off the folded paper he kept in his breast pocket.

  No news on either of his girls today, and no sign they were looking for him. He logged off and got his card back from Janice.

  He took the escalator to the third floor and picked a carrel in a quiet corner. Then, as he did every Wednesday, rain or shine, he pulled every new law review off the shelf and started to read.

  Chapter 16

  When the burly man had loaded the oven into the back of the pickup, he’d made it look so easy.

  No way could Cyndi move it herself. She’d have to wait for Mike to have time to help her.

  She’d been so excited to find a working industrial stove on Craigslist for a fraction of what she’d expected to pay. A split second decision and a drive across town and she had the last piece of necessary equipment, and under budget, too.

  If only she could get it off the back of the truck and in the front door.

  She thought if she climbed into the truck bed and pushed the oven from behind, she could find its balancing point and tip it out slowly, then walk it to the kitchen. It was a foolish plan, but she was so eager to move it in, she couldn’t wait for Mike to get here. She tried climbing into the back of the truck by swinging one leg up onto the tailgate and hefting herself up. She couldn’t even get her foot as high as the tailgate. She turned her back to the truck, placed both palms on the edge of the metal, and hopped, trying to land her behind on the tailgate.

  She didn’t even get close.

  She hopped a little higher, trying to land her larger-than-before backside on the topside of the tailgate.

  No luck.

  Not to be deterred, she climbed on top of one of the tires and positioned herself to scramble over the side of the bed. She hoped none of the shop owners was watching the awkward display. I
f they were, she’d given them plenty to talk about.

  “Need some help?” She heard the man’s voice from behind.

  “No thanks. I’ve got it.” She repositioned her hands a little and started to heft herself up.

  He bounded into the back of the truck, letting a skateboard clatter to the ground beside it. Not a man, a boy, with spiky hair and baggy clothes. “No, really, I can help. Where are you taking it?” He readied himself to push.

  “Into the kitchen.” She let her leg drop back to the safety of the ground and backed up to catch the upper edge of the oven when it reached her. The boy slid the behemoth as far as he could, then started tipping it toward the ground. Cyndi grabbed the lip and adjusted the oven’s angle so it could be let down with minimum effort. As soon as its weight rested on the ground, the boy bounded out and grabbed the stove top corners. Cyndi straightened and helped him ease the other two corners to solid earth.

  “I’m Cyndi,” she said, putting out a hand in greeting.

  “Zach.” He wiped his palms on his T-shirt before shaking her hand.

  “I’ve seen you here a lot. You’re the skater, right? You’re pretty good.”

  “Yeah, I skate.”

  “Isn’t there a skate park around here? Isn’t it more fun to hang out with other kids?”

  “Nah, those guys are all posers.”

  “Posers?”

  “You know, guys who try to act like they’re all that but can’t skate worth anything. Or worse, little kids who come with their mommies and tattle on anyone who bends the rules a little. At least here I can make my own rules, you know?” He tossed his skateboard into a patch of grass near the sidewalk. “How we gonna get this inside?”

  “I think I have a dolly. Hold on a second.” Cyndi unlocked the door to the kitchen. She found the dolly in the storage closet.

  “If I hold the stove at an angle, it should balance its weight. Can you push and steer?” she asked.

  Zach grunted.

  She guessed that meant yes.

  They maneuvered the monster to the edge of the sidewalk and lined it up with the door. Cyndi found a rock and propped the door open as wide as it would go.