by Robyn Carr
“L.A. was also…pretty temporary,” she said.
Her hesitation and her downcast eyes made Mike think she was lying.
“Mrs. Palmer, are you in some kind of trouble?”
Her head snapped back. “Yeah. My house just burned down, my car keys are in there somewhere, I have no money—oh, I had forty-two dollars and some cents in my purse for groceries for the rest of the week till payday, but I imagine that’s gone, too. And I lied about L.A. I was there for more than three years. I had already borrowed as much as my former friends were willing to—” She stopped abruptly, took a deep breath and quieted herself. “There was no farewell party, all right? I didn’t actually do anything wrong, I just…had a run of bad luck. An unpleasant divorce. My ex is a…scoundrel. It gets rough sometimes.”
“Oh,” Mike said, pretending to understand. “Make any calls to the Red Cross? Victims’ Services?”
She nodded. “And two crisis counseling centers, four shelters and a church group that’s helping illegal aliens. Do you know what? My house burned down on the first freezing night in Sacramento. Everyone, it seems, has come in off the streets.”
“No luck?”
She shrugged. “I have two more numbers here. The Opportunity Hotel and a place called Totem Park. Do you suppose you have to sleep outside in Totem Park?”
“I know so,” he said, frowning. “Here, let me try the hotel,” he offered, pulling the phone across the desk. She turned the pad on which she had written the number toward him. He glanced at the sleeping kids as he waited for an answer on the line. Their shiny yellow heads were clean, their pajamas the warm and tidy kind. They were obviously well cared for, with healthy skin and teeth. Bright, alert eyes, when they were awake.
This particular shelter, called a hotel because they took a few dollars from people who either overstayed or could afford it, was possibly the sleaziest place in the city, Mike knew. Some people actually preferred the street to places like this; protection from the other homeless was difficult to provide. Even though she didn’t have anything to steal, Christine Palmer didn’t look tough enough to fend off an assault. He glanced at the kids again; the ringing continued on the line. The shelter was filthy, nasty. He wondered if there were rats.
Finally there was an answer. “Hi, this is Captain Mike Cavanaugh, Sacramento Fire Department. We’re trying to place a homeless family—woman and two small kids. Any room down there?”
The man on the line said yes.
“Oh, too bad. Thanks anyway,” Mike said, making his decision and hanging up quickly.
“I’ll call Mr. Iverson in the morning, when the store opens. He’s a pretty decent guy. Maybe he’ll advance me some pay or something.”
“Are you completely orphaned?” He didn’t mean to sound incredulous, but he came from a large family himself and had trouble picturing a life without relatives. Cavanaugh. Irish Catholic. Six kids.
“My parents are dead; I’m an only child. There’s this unmarried aunt back in Chicago, where I grew up, but she probably hates my guts. We parted on very unfriendly terms a long while back.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Actually, it was all my fault. But I’m sure if I grovel and beg and apologize enough, Aunt Florence will invite me and the kids back home. Chicago. Ugh. I hate the idea of crawling back to Chicago, all ashamed and sorry.” She slapped the laptop on the desk. “I was going to go back, you know. Patch things up with Aunt Flo, who is the only family I have in the world besides the kids. But later, hopefully with my tail straight up and not tucked between my legs.” Her voice quieted. “I’m not a bad writer. Some people have liked my work.”
“‘It’s worth a very lot,’” he said, quoting the little girl.
“Oh, to her,” Chris said, her voice becoming sentimental, almost sweet. “Carrie’s my biggest fan. Also the greatest kid in the whole world. Never lost faith in me—not once.” A large tear spilled over.
“No one, huh?” he asked her.
“I’m sure I’ll think of something in the morning. I’ve been called resourceful. Gutsy, even. Probably nice ways of saying I’m contrary and not easy to get along with.”
He laughed. She wasn’t nearly as hysterical as she could be, under the circumstances. Nor as scared. And he could relate; he wasn’t always easy to get along with, either. “Just so you get along,” he said.
“One way or the other.”
“Well, this doesn’t look good,” he supplied.
“No, but them’s the breaks, huh? I’ll think of something. I hope.”
According to six o’clock news stories, Mike considered, this was how it happened: some perfectly nice, smart, clean, decent individual hit a cultural snag—illness, divorce, unemployment. Fire. Then, with no money for rent deposits, utilities turn-on, child care or retraining, he or she was suddenly living out of a car. After about three weeks of living out of a car, no one would hire them. Then, if they did land a job by some miracle, they couldn’t work it because there was nowhere to shower, leave the kids or do the laundry. A mean social cycle. No money, no job. No job, no money. The forgotten people who were once accountants or engineers.
The press indicated the homeless situation was getting worse every year. The reported living conditions were terrifying. Hopeless and vile. The one common link among these people seemed to be aloneness, lack of family. Mike had family. Boy, did he.
“You know what?” he began. “Maybe we could help you get a news spot. A little—”
“What?”
“You know, get channel five to do a spot on the fire and your circumstances.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Donations to a post-office box or bank or—”
“Be on the news?”
“Yeah, because your house—”
“Oh, please. Please don’t do that. I’d die!”
“Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not like it was your fault, you know.”
“No. No. That would be awful!”
Okay, he thought, she’s hiding. From the ex? She didn’t look like a bank robber or kid—Kidnapper? He wondered if the ex had gotten custody. Yeah, he decided. That was probably it. Well, maybe. Whatever, she was hiding something. He wondered how much.
“Tell you what. I live alone. You could use my place for a couple of days. It’s a roof.”
“What?” she said, almost laughing. “Come on, that’s not your usual policy. In fact, judging from some of the looks we’ve gotten, I’d say you don’t have a whole lot of fire victims in your rec room, either.”
“It’s not usual,” he admitted. He shook his head. He had surprised himself as much as her with the offer. But Christmas was coming, and the kids were clean, cute, precocious. She had some secrets, but he was sure they weren’t the dangerous kind. Bad luck, she had said. Most of all, they had no one. No one. Well, what the heck, he was someone.
“Fact is, none of this has been policy. The only other time we brought a fire victim here in the middle of the night, it was a relative of a firefighter. Upstairs they think I’ve gone soft in the head.”
“We’d better get out of here.”
“Naw, no problem. Here’s the deal, Christine. Can I call you Christine? Chrissie?”
“How about Chris.”
He nodded. “Well, here it is, Chris. I’m a little soft in the head. You seem to be having some rotten luck, and I don’t have to know what happened to you, but that little girl of yours reminds me of my little girl. She was a lot like that one,” he said, jerking his head toward the sofa. “Blond, opinionated, had an IQ of about four thousand. She died in a car accident with her mother about ten years ago. She was only three. And hell, it’s almost Christmas.”
Chris stared at him. She had only lost a house and everything she owned. Suddenly it didn’t seem like much.
“So,” he said, watching her watch him. “I don’t spend all that much time at my house. I sleep here when I’m on duty, I have a cabin I like to use when I have a few days off in a ro
w, and I have family all over Sacramento. It’s a pretty good-sized place, I guess. Three bedrooms. You could make a few calls, get some things like insurance paperwork started. You might say a few things to that landlord about the furnace, and he might settle with you real quick, but there could be a lawsuit in it. You didn’t hear that from me, okay? And then, before you grovel to your old-maid aunt, you’d have a little edge. There don’t seem to be many alternatives.” He shrugged. “It would be too bad to have to take those kids to one of those crappy shelters. Most of them are pretty awful.”
“Your house,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. She looked at him a little differently. She judged his size and musculature.
“My parents live just around the corner, and I could stay with them when I’m not here. I might be soft in the head, but I’m pretty safe. Anyway—” he smiled “—you have him,” he said, glancing at Cheeks.
“Gee, that’s…really generous of you,” she said, but she said it cautiously, suspiciously. Mike wondered if she had been abused by the ex. He wondered how abused.
“It’s a pretty well-known fact that firefighters have a weakness for little kids. It’s up to you. I live alone, but I have this house. I didn’t even want it, to tell you the truth, but my family started hounding me about doing something with my money—real estate, you know. Sometimes you have to do something just so that everyone in your very nosy family will get off your back. So they talk you into buying something, investing. Then they stop worrying and start calling you moneybags.” He chuckled to himself. “In my family, everyone minds everyone’s business but their own. It’s an Irish tradition.”
“What will your very nosy family say if you take in this completely unknown, whacked-out, poverty-stricken divorcée with two kids and a dog?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’ll probably shake their heads and say, ‘It figures.’ They gave up on me a long time ago; I’m the one they always shake their heads over. They call me ornery. Probably just a nice way of saying I’m not easy to get along with,” he said, and grinned that big grin again.
“You?”
“Yeah. Don’t I seem ornery?”
She tilted her head and looked at him. He smiled confidently through her appraisal. “No,” she said after a moment. Gentle. Generous. Never ornery. “But they know you better than I do.”
“They have their reasons, I suppose.” Reason number one, they couldn’t get him remarried after Joanie and Shelly were gone. Not a one of them—not three brothers and their wives, not two sisters and all the friends they had in Sacramento. Tough, he told them. He had never liked dating, and he kept his few liaisons to himself; they had never come to much, anyway. Though he missed Joanie and Shelly, he no longer minded being alone. He had gone through school with Joanie, married her when he was twenty and she was eighteen. And he had known he was going to do that the first time he kissed her.
He had liked being a husband and father. And he wasn’t anymore.
What he also liked was to hunt, a reclusive sport. He liked the department’s baseball team, the gym, the little one-room house in the mountains and sitting in front of a television set with his dad and brothers when they couldn’t get tickets to a game. He liked to read, and he liked to putter under his car. He was solitary but not antisocial. Sometimes he needed sex, someone to make love with, but he didn’t like doing it with strangers and there hadn’t been very many women over the years who’d become friends. It had been quite a while, in fact. He was a little disappointed in himself for that, but he had become a man who put his energy into a lot of physical things and thereby coped with a primary physical need left unmet. The longer he waited, the less urgent he felt.
He was a quiet, private, sometimes lonely man who had no one to spend his money on except his mom and dad, his brothers and sisters and their spouses and kids. Uncle Mike. He knew what he was becoming—the odd uncle, gentle with some, crotchety with others. Difficult and sometimes short-tempered. Like Cheeks.
“What do you think? Got any better ideas?”
“I…uh…it’s hard for me to take…you know, charity. I don’t know if…”
He tilted his head toward the sleeping kids. “They won’t know the difference. You oughta see some of those shelters. You’ve got a job, so pay me a little rent if you want, later, when you get it together. Or maybe you could do a few things around the house? Like cleaning or laundry?” He tried not to draw his eyebrows meanly over his nose, which happened whenever he lied. His house was immaculate, and his mother did his laundry. She insisted.
“What if I’m a crook or something? What if I hot-wire my old Honda, clean out your house and haul your TV and stereo off to Mexico?” She was weakening.
Mike laughed. “They’d never let you across the border with that dog.” Cheeks growled on cue. “God, he’s a piece of work. If he bites me, he’s out. Does he, um, make any mistakes?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “He’s really a very good dog, just crabby. And the kids are pretty good, too.” And there it was. Without her saying anything more, he knew it was decided. She and the kids would move in tomorrow.
In the morning, while Jim scrambled eggs for the whole crew, Carrie tugged on Mike’s sweatpants. He looked down into her pretty blue eyes. “Our mother says we’re going to stay at your house for a little while, because our house is burned.”
“Do you think you’ll mind?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. She smiled at him. “Do you want us to?”
“I invited you, didn’t I?”
“We always pick up our toys and our dirty clothes,” she informed him. “Kyle is just learning, but he’s learning very good.”
“I’m sure you’re very neat,” Mike said. “But I’m a little bit sloppy.”
Carrie’s expression changed suddenly. She looked over her shoulder toward her little brother, who was sitting on the couch with his thumb in his mouth. Then she looked back up at Mike’s face. “Our toys burned up,” she said, her expression stoic.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I must’ve forgotten. I have toys. They’re at my mother’s house, but she’ll let you borrow them. If you promise to pick them up, of course.”
She smiled suddenly, and her eyes became very like her mother’s. “We’ll pick them up. We’re learning very good.”
Cheeks growled.
“Can you make him stop doing that?” Mike asked her.
“If he gets used to you, he stops it. You must not hit him. It will make him mean.”
“He already sounds mean.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling a wild young smile that was tangy with innocence and made Mike feel warm all over. “But he only sounds it,” she added with a giggle.
He wanted to crush her in his big arms. He became afraid of himself, his hard and trembling shell, his gushy innards. He was an uncle who had cuddled many nieces and nephews since he’d lost his own child, but he suddenly, desperately, wished to hold a child who needed to be held.
He picked her up, gently. His loneliness, his aching desire for a family of his own, pressed against the backs of his eyes. What was he doing with this child in his arms? A long time ago he’d stopped trying to replace what he’d lost. After ten years, he’d built a strong enough wall that he didn’t have to face what he had lost. But holding this little girl shook loose the bricks he had used to build his wall.
Everything they had was gone, and it hadn’t been much to start with. Yet these people were not the destitute ones.
Chapter 3
Mike opened the front door for them but did not go in to show them around. He and Chris had talked on the way over. He said he had a lot to get done on his days off, and she had important decisions to make, phone calls to place. Calls that Mike suggested might be easier if he wasn’t there to listen.
“You go ahead and look around,” he told her. “You won’t have any trouble recognizing the two extra bedrooms. The one with the desk and the couch, well, the couch folds out into a bed. And keep the kids
out of the garage, okay? There are power tools out there. I’ll be back around lunchtime.”
“Look, I feel kind of funny, going in alone and everything. There’s no reason you should trust me, you know. I mean, it’s not too late to—”
“Is there anything you’re looking for besides a way to take care of your kids?” he countered.
“No,” she answered.
“That’s what I figured. Just make your calls. I’m going to stop by the house you rented. If I found an ash that might have been a purse, would your car keys be in it? Maybe a crispy cell phone?”
“Yes, keys. No phone—too expensive.” She smiled. “Hey, that would be great. Really, I don’t know how to thank you for all this.”
“Don’t worry about that. I don’t usually do things I don’t want to do. It just isn’t that big a deal.”
“It is,” she said, peeking into the house. “It’s a very, very big deal.”
“Naw.” He shrugged. “The place just about stands vacant. I’ll see you in a few hours, then. And listen, I’m going to be pretty tied up for a couple of days, so I hope you can handle all your reorganizing without my help.” As if it had just occurred to him, he added, “Since I’m going to stay with my folks, take…uh…the master bedroom, if you want.”
Then he vanished. Chris cautiously placed Cheeks on the floor inside the front door. As she and the children stood watching, he ran down the stairs from the foyer into the carpeted living room. “Please, God,” she said, “don’t let him pee.” He scooted around the floor like a windup toy, his whiskers flush against the rug, zooming a pattern of certainty that no other dog had marked the place. He paused for a long while at the coffee table leg. “I’ll kill you,” Chris warned. The terrier looked over his shoulder at her, then zoomed on.
As Cheeks sniffed and scooted around downstairs, Chris and the kids peeked up the short flight of steps leading to the bedrooms. The three of them were all a little frightened of the fireman’s house. It was quiet, new, immaculate, not theirs. Chris finally stepped across the hardwood entry onto the thick gray carpet that flowed down the steps.
