is the first good thing that’s happened to me since I woke up. Sorry I snapped at you.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t trying to make you feel foolish. It just seemed odd to me that someone as bright as you are would have forgotten to bring her umbrella with her on a day when it’s raining cats and dogs. It never occurred to me that you didn’t own one.”
“Well, if you have to choose between buying school supplies for your daughter or an umbrella for yourself, school supplies win every time. Besides, when I left the apartment this morning, I hadn’t figured I’d be taking the bus, so even if I had an umbrella, I probably wouldn’t have brought it with me. See?” I said cheerfully, hoping to ease past the awkward moment. “I’m obviously not as bright as you thought.”
Abigail returned my smile, arching her eyebrows as she pressed her foot farther down on the gas now that we were in the less populated part of town where there were fewer police cruisers on the lookout for speeders. “Somehow I doubt that. Bethany is as bright as a new penny and, in my experience, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In another situation, I might suppose she could have inherited that from her father. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I’m guessing he wasn’t all that intelligent. If he was, you and the children wouldn’t be here in New Bern, would you?”
I didn’t respond. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss my invented past with Abigail. But I did appreciate her insight. For all her imposing, sometimes intimidating aura of self-certainty, she meant well. And she’d certainly been kind to the kids.
“I’m sorry you’re having a bad day. My own hasn’t been exactly red letter,” she said, launching into an explanation before giving me a chance to ask for one.
“I am not looking forward to this meeting. It’s just going to be another exercise in futility, everyone sitting around the conference table grumbling and groaning about the need for more emergency and transitional housing to help women like you, and reaching no consensus about how to solve the problem. At the end of three hours, we’ll be lucky if we’ve agreed on so much as when to hold our next meeting! And the whole time we sit there, drinking coffee and doing nothing, the waitlist of families needing our services grows longer. It’s so frustrating!”
“Well,” I said slowly, not quite understanding why the solution to this problem wasn’t obvious to Abigail, “why don’t you get a new building? Something bigger.”
“Of course, that’s what we’d like to do. We’ve discussed it at excruciating length, but it isn’t as easy as just digging a foundation and putting up walls. To begin with, there’s the question of money. The kind of facility we’d need would cost millions, perhaps tens of millions. I’d be perfectly willing to pay for it through the Wynne Family Foundation. But Donna Walsh, the director, feels very strongly that it must be a community-wide fund-raising effort, something that people in town could all get behind. If I just swooped in and paid for it, Donna thinks it could start a backlash against the very families we’re trying to help.” Abigail drew her eyebrows together thoughtfully.
“I suppose there’s something to that,” she mused. “We don’t want people to start looking at the shelter residents as an alien population that has been imposed upon them without their input or consent. But a big fund-raising effort can take years to mount. We’ve got people knocking on our door who need help now, not ten years from now!”
“I can see why you’re frustrated.”
“And that’s not the half of it. Even if we had the money in hand today, I’m not sure where we’d find land in a location that would be suitable for a project of this size. We need space to house at least ten families. And in a central location, somewhere close to schools, community services, and public transportation.”
This subject hit too close to home. My resolution to say as little as possible melted like an ice cream cone on a summer day.
“You can say that again!” I huffed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that we were able to move into the Stanton Center, but it would sure make things easier if it weren’t so far off the beaten path.
“Take today; when my car wouldn’t start I had to jog a mile to catch a bus and ended up late for work. Evelyn’s a good boss—she understands that things happen—but someone else’s employer might not. Being late to work even once might cost a woman her job. After housing, transportation is the biggest problem most of us face. We simply can’t afford to buy reliable cars, not to mention the gas, insurance, and maintenance to keep them running. If we could live closer in and on the bus line, I’d get rid of my car tomorrow! Everything in New Bern is so close that I could walk to most of the stores. If I didn’t have the expense of owning a car, it would make it much easier to save money.”
Abigail nodded firmly as she made a hard right into the parking lot of the Stanton Center. “You’re right. Absolutely right. But that’s the problem. New Bern is an old New England town and all the in town lots of any size were built on decades ago. The only available building lots around here are either too small for our purposes, or even farther off the beaten path than what we have now. I’ve racked my brain, but I can’t see a solution to this. Not a good one, anyway.”
She spied an empty parking spot between two cars, wedged her sedan between them at an alarming speed, and set her parking brake, stomping on the pedal as if it were some sort of poisonous insect. “I’m simply out of ideas.”
“It’s too bad some of those big mansions in New Bern, you know, those giant places over on Proctor, aren’t for sale,” I said jokingly. “A couple of weeks ago, we went for a walk down that street. Those houses sure are something. One of those places would be big enough to hold ten families.”
I smiled, remembering the day. The calendar had only just turned to spring. Crocuses were blooming in the flower beds that had been covered with snow only a few days before. At one house, the crocuses were sprouting at odd spots all through the lawn, as if they’d just sprung up on their own, like wildflowers in a field, though I doubted that was the case. I couldn’t see people in this neighborhood just letting any old flower pop up in their lawn. Probably someone had planted them there to give the impression of wildness, but that was all right. They were pretty, no matter how they’d gotten there.
The sun was warm. Bobby kept pulling off his hat, a knitted stocking cap with two brown and white ovals that made him look like a teddy bear. He looked so cute, but I knew that by this time next year, he’d balk at being seen wearing a teddy-bear hat, just like he was beginning to balk at riding in the stroller. When I was little, my dad used to joke that he was going to put me in a pickle barrel to keep me from getting any bigger. Now I understood what he was talking about. My baby was almost a little boy and my little girl halfway to grown. Make that three quarters.
She’d insisted on being the one to push Bobby’s stroller, walking behind it like a miniature mother as we ooohed and ahhhed over the enormous mansions and talked about which houses we’d like to live in if we were ever rich.
My favorite was a sprawling white colonial with black shutters and six dormers tucked into the roofline. The main part of the house was huge to begin with, but it was clear that, over the years, people had added on to the original structure, tacking on a solarium here or a library there as their needs and taste in architecture had changed. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest house on the street, but something about the evolution of this home appealed to me, maybe because I liked to see how each generation built upon the foundation of the one that came before. The roofline was slightly bowed, and yet it looked like it had always been there and always would be.
“You’d never run out of guest rooms in a house like that,” I said to Bethany. “On the other hand, maybe you’d have a hard time getting the guests to go home. And of course, there’d be all those bathrooms to clean. Still,” I said wistfully, “it would sure be something to live in a house like that, don’t you think so, peanut?”
Bethany nodded noncommittally, obviously not as enamored with the house as I was. “I like that one,” she said, pointing off to the far right.
“Which