Joy had been about to hand him a twenty dollar bill, rolling down her window to do so, but at Robyn’s comment she stopped herself. “What would you do if you could help him?” she asked instead.
Robyn was still angry at being duped. “I don’t know, but he would be welcome at the shelter.”
“And then what? You send him on his way in the morning with a sandwich?”
Stung at exactly what they had to do time and again, which frustrated her, Robyn became angrier. “At least we don’t promise them things we have no intention of delivering.”
Joy was angry now and knew Robyn was right. “Why don’t you tell me what you need and I will see that it gets delivered?” she countered.
“Yeah, right. Why bother? You probably aren’t the Joy of Joy Foundation and you coming down here is all a con of some sort. I know your type. They come, they think they can solve all the problems of the down-trodden, and then they disappear. Lady, people like you are a menace.”
“Did you ever think it’s not all it seems to be?” Joy’s well-modulated tones were apparent again. “I could help. I can help.”
“Then put up or shut up,” Robyn challenged as they got back to the shelter and she got out of the car angrily.
Joy watched her go, just as angry…and a little hurt. She had hoped for a friendship, and she had felt an attraction. She did not even know if Robyn was gay, but she could always use a friend. She guessed she had blown it. She looked around the car. Nothing she had kept in it was there anymore so she reached into the glove compartment and walked into the shelter.
“I would like to donate my car to the shelter?” she told one of the worker’s inside. They soon had the title signed and she left with a donation receipt and walked away from the shelter, still angry that she hadn’t seen Robyn one more time and been able to work things out. She also had a list of things that one of the volunteers had scribbled out on a paper they kept for when people asked what they needed…the worker had added other items to the standard list.
Joy checked out of the hotel and had a cab take her to a nicer one. Not the Pfister, but a nicer hotel where she did not feel she had to hide her cell phone, laptop, or other things. She caught up on her emails, her phone messages, including ones from her new lawyers, and set about making a difference. She realized she couldn’t do it alone and wished she could call Robyn to help. She really did not know a lot of people she could trust in Milwaukee and she certainly couldn’t call anyone in her family.
Instead, she rented a van, went to the local Sam’s Club, joined, and then talked to the store manager. He gave her a tremendous discount on the pallet loads of food and other things she bought, and arranged to have them delivered to the three shelters she had visited, in Robyn’s name. She grinned at that one. She also filled the van with everything she couldn’t buy by the pallet load and made repeated deliveries over the next week, avoiding Robyn by delivering after breakfast when she had left for the day.
“This is not going to solve the problem for the homeless in Milwaukee,” she told herself. She also was not going to impress Robyn, the first woman she had shown any interest in for a long time. She had had emails and even phone messages from friends in Europe, asking when she was coming ‘home,’ but she did not feel like it anymore. Milwaukee had been her home, it was where her first memories were, it was where her parents had raised her. She wanted to make a difference here. She got on her laptop and began to Google ideas. She came across an article about a Canadian town that had eliminated homelessness in their town.
It was a town called Medicine Hat and they had started something called the Housing First Initiative. She read that they had gotten over nine hundred homeless off their streets. She found a YouTube video that was a news report about it and watched it avidly. One of the workers explained, “They used to say, ‘Get off the drugs, get off the alcohol, then we would give you a place to live,’ but we reversed that idea.” She saw where Housing First showed where it can cost twenty thousand (Canadian) per person to house the homeless. It can cost a city five times that amount for ERs and other services. One of the people who initiated the program stated, “It’s hard to solve your problems, your personal problems, when you are living under a park bench.” By providing them a place to live, they could tackle the problems that cause homelessness: drug abuse, domestic violence, and unemployment.
Watching all this inspired Joy. She had thought the Joy Foundation would simply supply the shelters with badly needed funds, but this, this was an answer to a growing problem. She now looked at the lots she owned in a different way. With this in mind, she called her attorneys in Dallas.
“I need a referral to a firm here in Milwaukee that can handle things locally,” she told Johnathan Scott, the lead attorney prosecuting her claims for fraud in Texas.
“Is there something we can do for you, Ms. Parker?” he asked respectfully.
“I do not think you can help from there in Texas, Mr. Scott,” she answered back just as respectfully. “I need someone on the ground here in Milwaukee. I want to reactivate the Joy Foundation here and get it running. Someone local would know about the whats and wherefores here in Wisconsin.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed with her. He had worried they were about to lose her business, but with the large retainer she had given them, they had their work cut out for them in Texas. They didn’t have a branch in Wisconsin, so he would have to look into that for her and told her so.
“Please call me when you have some names.” She told him what she had in mind and what she wanted to accomplish so he could find someone with similar goals to her own that could direct her, cut through red tape, and refer her to architects, social workers, and the right people to make this happen.
The next day she went to a cell phone store and got a local number. People calling her regular cell phone in Europe were probably paying a mint to do so. She wanted to be available, locally, and in the United States as she implemented the plans she was initiating. She next sent out emails to her lawyers and her American banks with the new number.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“What do you mean, thank you for the donation? What donation?” Robyn asked, annoyed. Everyone had been treating her funny since she came in to work today.
“Those pallet loads arrived from Sam’s Club right after you left this morning, along with that van load,” someone explained.
“I didn’t have anything to do with loads from Sam’s Club or a van?” she wrinkled her nose, wondering what this was about.
“That woman, Joy something, said you told her to deliver here,” someone else put in. He knew, he’d helped unload the van. And it had been one of those big extended vans, loaded to the ceiling with things they could use at the shelter and usually had to do without.
Hearing the name Joy, Robyn gritted her teeth. Thought she was so clever, did she? Wait until she got hold of her! She didn’t though. As deliveries were made in her name at all three of the local shelters, the kind words, the thank yous, the gratitude began to wear on Robyn’s nerves.
“You should have told us you were going to make such generous donations,” one of her supervisors told her. “We could have had a plaque made for ‘volunteer of the year’ or something.” She thought she was being kind, generous, and Robyn was more annoyed than she could tell anyone. She gave a fake little smile.
“You wouldn’t believe what she did!” she told her best friend Callie. She proceeded to tell her since she couldn’t tell anyone at the shelters or at work; it made her sound too modest.
“So, this woman pretended to be homeless in order to see the needs of the shelters?” Callie asked practically to calm her down.
“Yeah, can you believe it? She obviously has money since she can have all these things donated!”
“Maybe she really is this Joy of the Joy Foundation. So, why are you so angry? Because she saw what the shelter needed and did something about it?”
“Because…because…” she saw Callie�
��s amusement at her ruffled feathers and began to calm down. “Oh, shut up!” she said before stalking away.
But why was she so angry? she thought later. Was it because Joy was the Joy Foundation, the one that had taken away her hopes when she was in college learning to be a social worker? The donations proved that Joy had the money to do what she said she would. Was she mad because she had enjoyed talking to Joy and thought she had made a friend? She couldn’t wrap her head around it. She didn’t even think about the attraction she had felt.
The donations were a one-time thing, or so the delivery guys said. As they didn’t see Joy around anymore, Robyn figured she had come and gone. She was sorry for that. She would have liked to apologize. She also wanted to thank her. She realized after she calmed down what a joke on her it had been to make the donations in her name. She wanted a chance to see the blonde again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Joy met with an attorney in Milwaukee, outlining what she wanted to do based on what they had done in Canada. The first attorney was fired because all he could say was ‘We can’t’ and Joy did not want to hear that. It was her land, she had bought it, and she wanted to turn it into a little self-sustaining village that the taxpayers did not pay for. A village that the homeless could live in, even work in, as they pulled themselves up and out of the fix they were in.
“You realize the city is going to…” began the next attorney.
“It’s my land and if I want to build a few buildings on it I can hire contractors, ones required to hire the homeless, and build the buildings, can’t I?”
The firm she ended up hiring helped her to meet contractors and others who would help with her little project. They all flew up to Alberta to see, in person, how they had done it. The contractors, all vetted by her attorneys, had signed contracts of confidentiality as well as letters of intent to the tentative plans Joy had drawn up. They were all impressed as they boarded the private plane to Canada. After flying commercial from Europe and across the US, Joy had decided that not only could she afford to fly by private plane, but it made more sense so she did not have to put up with people she did not want to. It also gave the people she was working with a place to have unending meetings as they discussed what they were going to do.
“Ms. Parker,” she was greeted by the mayor himself. He had been warned they were coming to observe how Medicine Hat had accomplished their goals of eliminating homelessness. He was impressed that this millionaire was taking an interest in their concept. He gladly showed her and her group the neat little homes that had been built to help the homeless, explained about the counselors available to help them get jobs, get on their feet, even deal with mental health concerns. “It’s so much cheaper that we can now focus on other things with the extra money instead of funneling it all to the homeless issue. I’d say it’s a nonissue now.”
Joy and her team were suitably impressed. The contractors took notes as to size and the concept that Joy wanted to enact. Later, they would discuss other options she wanted to add or implement.
“It isn’t fancy, but we can do it with those mini-houses I’ve seen and people can have their privacy,” one commented.
“But will we have enough room to make it?” another worried.
“I want to take it one step further and begin a bio-something where they have their own gardens, grow their own food, and become self-sustaining. They won’t be a drain on the city, they won’t be a drain on our taxes, so we can show other cities that yes, this can be done,” Joy directed as she got enthused for the idea they were creating.
“We can put in solar power and wind energy,” one of the contractors was getting excited as they all drew in on their specialties.
“But can you train them, will they be willing?” another expressed their concern.
“I think if you give them a chance, you will find that all they want is that chance,” Joy told them. “You cannot talk down to them, thinking they chose to be on the streets. You do not know their stories, and unless they choose to share it with you, you can’t ask, you can’t assume.” She spoke from her own knowledge of the situation they were facing.
Once they got back, the team began to draw up plans and ideas based on what they saw in Medicine Hat, which was a good start. Joy’s plan to make it self-sustaining meant they had to bring in more experts on that concept. Since Joy Foundation was paying for it, it made it easier to hire some of the best, and many times the concepts and plans were already available. It took months to get to the point where they could break ground and announce they would be hiring the homeless that cared to work towards their own homes.
Joy rented an apartment in one of the high-rises on the lake front. She needed a place to call her own, one that was furnished and private. She was about a twenty- to thirty-minute drive from the site they were starting on, and she had bought a nice Audi sedan for her purposes. Nothing like the sports cars she had driven in Europe, but she did not need anything that fancy, not here, not for these projects.
As she watched them begin her dreams, she felt really good about it. She had not really had any goals since she left college, but she knew this was right. It was a good cause for the money she had in such abundance. She could be happy about the concept, about what she was accomplishing, and yet…she still felt like she was an outsider looking in on her life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Have you heard about the Joy Foundation building on that parking lot over on…” Robyn heard people talking about it from time to time, but hadn’t heard the name until today. She realized they were talking about that woman she had met months ago, the one who had played that trick on her. “Yeah, they are building homes for the homeless.” Robyn’s ears picked up at that. She had told Joy to put her money where her mouth was. “Did you know they own this building too?” Robyn hadn’t known that.
“Yeah, they bought up a couple of places I heard. Going to tear them all down too.”
Robyn was alarmed at this news. “Where are the people going to go?” she asked, outraged. Joy had used them to scope out the shelters for investment purposes? She thought the woman was better than that.
One of the people telling them shrugged and said, “Well, where they always go…back on the streets.”
Robyn was not going to have that. She was outraged. With that in mind, she headed to the site where they were building the houses for the homeless. An obvious ploy to hide what Joy was really doing with the shelters. This was probably some massive tax write-off. She was livid. “Where will I find Joy of the Joy Foundation?” she asked angrily when she arrived. She could hear the sounds of heavy machinery that were breaking up the parking lot as well as tearing down some old, dilapidated houses on the block. It was all fenced off and she stood next to the entrance, talking to someone with a clipboard.
“Joy Parker?” someone asked, surprised.
“Yeah, where will I find Joy Parker?” she asked. Something about the full name was niggling in the back of her memory, but why, she didn’t know. Surely in the time she had talked to Joy she had heard her full name.
“She should be over there in the office. There was a delay on some of the deliveries to make the houses,” one of the workers told her and pointed towards a mobile office on wheels.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she made her way towards it, sidestepping large mud puddles from a recent rain. Knocking on the door, she heard, “Come in,” and turned the knob.
Joy looked up and was surprised to see Robyn standing there. Surprise turned to delight at seeing the brunette, and then her eyes narrowed as she saw the anger in her face. “Hello, may I help you?” she asked kindly. Many who came into the office assumed Joy just worked there. They had no idea who she was. She had been treated like a receptionist or a mere clerk, many times. Those seeking an interview were turned away with promises of a ‘tell-all’ when the project was further along. No one realized that Joy was THE Joy Parker of a story they had been looking for from years ago, not yet.
/> “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” she asked, not sure how to start this conversation she had sought out. She also questioned why she had sought it out. It was not her business what Joy of the Joy Foundation did with her money…or her land. From the massive amount of work going on outside, she obviously was here to stay and had the money to do so.
“I did, you got angry,” she pointed out. They had not seen each other in months and this was not going well. She had not expected to see Robyn again anyway. At least, not until they got to the other sites, which might take years. She had dismissed it, it had been a fleeting attempt at friendship.
“You weren’t honest up front,” she pointed out petulantly, remembering how she had felt sorry for the down on her luck blonde at first, making up a suitable story for her appearance.
“No, I was not, not completely. What I told you at first was true, I had lived on the streets, but that was long ago, a lifetime ago,” she said softly, her well-modulated tones coming through with no effort now, Robyn noticed. She also noticed the clothes the blonde was wearing, such a contrast to the ones she had worn when she first saw her. She could see it was all a ruse now. It made her angrier, if that was possible.
“You deceived us,” she pointed out.
Trying to hide her smile at the brunette’s obvious anger she answered, “Yes, I did.” She knew from her classes how hard it was to argue with someone who agreed with you and hoped it might defuse the situation.
“You lied,” she further pointed out.
“Not exactly. You assumed,” Joy tried to gently point out, but knew it was a mistake as she saw the battle signs rise in the brunette’s dark eyes.
“How dare…?” she began, but didn’t know exactly what to say.
“I needed to know. I needed to see with my own eyes what had not been done,” she tried to explain. “Do you know what it’s like to assume what you are told is being done, only to find out it is not?”
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