Shiloh was holding the list in plain sight, so it was clear the question was rhetorical, a word she was fond of and had recently added to her vocabulary. “Like I said, we don’t have much gas. All these places are downtown.”
The woman nodded. Then she walked behind her desk, got her purse and rummaged through it, coming out with a ten-dollar bill, which she held out to Shiloh. “I don’t know what else to do for you.”
They needed that money. Really needed it, because all they had was a ten to match it and a few ones to go with it.
Shiloh had taken money before, but this evening her hand remained closed, her arm by her side. “I can’t take money from you. That’s not what I was asking for. I just thought, well, maybe your church...” Her voice trailed off.
The woman walked around her desk, took Shiloh’s hand and put the bill inside it, closing the girl’s fingers around it. “We help when we can. It’s just that there’s nobody here, honey. Reverend Ana’s away...” Something flickered in the woman’s dark eyes. “At a rally for the homeless downtown.” She clearly realized how ironic that was. “There’ll be people at the rally from the different agencies on that list. It’s pretty late, but if you leave right now, maybe you can still catch the end of it.”
Shiloh knew about downtown. The Fowlers’ Ford inhaled gas as if it knew each fume might be the last, and parking inside city limits was so expensive the ten dollars would be long gone before they could find anybody who might help. Besides, she already knew that housing for homeless families was pretty much nonexistent. If they were lucky she and her mother might be able to stay one place, and Dougie and her father another. But Man—Shiloh’s father—would never allow that. He liked to say that all the Fowler family had right now was each other, and that was plenty good enough.
When he talked at all.
“I appreciate your kindness,” Shiloh said, words she had practically patented in the years since her family had left their snug little ranch house in southern Ohio to begin a fruitless search for a new life and home.
The woman averted her eyes and began to stack papers on her desk, clearly ready to leave for the evening. “I hope you find the help you need.”
Shiloh murmured more thanks, then she left by the front door and wound her way toward the sheltered nook between this building and the rear wing of another with a sign that read Covenant Academy. She knew her family would be huddled there against the cold, waiting for her.
The afternoon had been almost pleasantly warm, and Shiloh had been hopeful the evening would remain warm, too. But hope was a funny thing. Anything she wanted, any yearning that eventually formed into words, was nearly always denied her. Her mother, Belle, was superstitious, and Shiloh worked hard to have absolutely nothing in common with her, but in this one way she was superstitious, too. Most of the time she was adept at pushing away thoughts of anything worth yearning for. Because wanting anything was the best way never to have it.
She shivered and reached down to zip up her coat in response. The coat was a hand-me-down from her cousin Lilac in South Carolina. There were three kinds of hand-me-downs and handouts. The rarest were those that not only met a need but made her feel good inside. The rest were evenly distributed between “good enough” and “completely unacceptable.”
Lilac’s old coat was good enough. Pillowy, slick, dark green. The cuffs were frayed and the lining was tattered, but the coat was warm and it more or less fit, with just a little room in case Shiloh ever grew taller. She had been lucky to get it, because Lilac’s younger sister, Daisy, who, by rights, should have gotten it next, had received a better hand-me-down from somebody at her church.
If she slept in the coat inside her sleeping bag Shiloh would be warm enough tonight. Man had once been a hunter, scouring the hills near their home with men he’d known since boyhood, so he was used to camping in rugged conditions. Belle could sleep in the car with all their blankets. Dougie, Shiloh’s nine-year-old brother, would be the problem. He had a warm coat, too, but he swore the wool made him itch, and he would rather freeze to death than scratch all night. Shiloh would have to get tough with him.
Like always.
When she rounded the corner Belle was sitting on concrete steps leading up to what seemed to be a back door into the building where the church offices were. Man was sitting just below her on the concrete pad at the bottom. Dougie was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s Dougie?” Shiloh asked.
Belle didn’t answer. She looked from side to side, as if expecting the boy to materialize out of the shadows.
Man cleared his throat. “He’s looking around. He’ll be back.”
Shiloh was afraid that meant her brother was relieving himself behind some of the massive bushes providing a barrier between the area where they sat and the deserted school beyond. “Most everybody was gone. The secretary gave me ten dollars, but that was all she could do.”
If possible Man looked more dejected. “You shouldn’t oughta have asked.”
“I didn’t! She offered it, and when I didn’t take it, she made me.”
Man had always been slight and stooped from long hours on a factory line. But now, after eighteen months of trying to reestablish the family somewhere with a future, he looked haggard, even emaciated. Shiloh was reminded of a skeleton from a middle-school biology textbook, and her words seemed to make his flesh shrink even tighter against his bones.
“We’ll pass it on when we can,” he said.
“We can buy Mama some cough syrup.” Shiloh’s gaze flicked to her mother, who didn’t register her words.
“We’d best get going.” Man got to his feet. “Dougie!”
“I think we should stay here,” Shiloh said, after he had called her brother again. “We’re tucked away, nice and cozy, and nobody’s going to see us. Mama can sleep in the car by herself, and you, me and Dougie can put up our tent against that wall. We don’t have money to pay for a campsite, and with what the lady gave me and what little we have left we can get food and some medicine for Mama.”
“This is a churchyard, Shiloh. They won’t want us hanging out here tonight. It was okay while I was off looking for work this afternoon, but now we need to find a quiet place to sleep in the car.”
“Mama’s going to cough all night, even with medicine. Nobody’s going to sleep if we’re all crowded up in the car together. We won’t hurt anything back here. We can go in the morning before it gets light and nobody will ever know. And you know that door Mama’s practically leaning against? It’s not locked. I tried it earlier. I bet it’s supposed to be, but somebody forgot. So we can go inside and use the restroom, wash up and stuff before we go to sleep. Maybe even move inside tonight if it gets too cold.”
“We don’t break into buildings.”
“I didn’t say anything about breaking in. But this building’s not locked, and that’s kind of like an invitation. Besides, we’ll only go inside if we have to. Mama’s too sick to drive all over looking for a place to stay. Looks to me like we got one already.”
As if on cue Belle broke her silence by coughing. The cough was deep and ragged, like a chained pit bull straining for freedom. She had a constant cough from too many years of smoking, but in the past week the cough had gone from a warning to an alarm. It wasn’t worse than yesterday, though, and Shiloh was heartened by that.
“I saw a drugstore and a Taco Bell not far away,” Shiloh said when her father didn’t answer. “You can set up the tent and get out the sleeping bags while I get supper, and after we eat, Mama can get comfortable in the car.” Which was a stupid thing to say, because nobody, especially a woman as overweight as Belle, could get comfortable on the Ford’s backseat.
Dougie took that moment to appear, breaking into the clearing at a run. He skidded to a stop just in front of his sister and made a face at her.
Shiloh