Love's Sweet Shelter

CHAPTER ONE

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
PRESENT DAY
Saturday morning seven a.m.

“Mom!” Kate’s oldest son was yelling at her from the second floor…again.

“Cam, I asked you not to yell at me from your room. Please come down here and tell me what you need.”

Twelve-year-old Cameron was tall and lanky. He was at that awkward stage that boys go through between eleven and teenage and for poor Cam it had been made worse by the fact that his father wasn’t here. Kate did the best she could, but she knew that she was a poor substitute at times for a father.

Cam came bounding down the stairs two at a time. “I can’t find my glove,” he said, screwing up his face in almost the same way that Conner, his dad, used to do. Sometimes having a son who looked so much like his dad was a blessing, and sometimes looking into those green eyes that put Kate so much in mind of Conner was gut-wrenching.

“Did you look under the bed?” she asked.

“Why would it be under there?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but that seems to be where you find everything else that “goes missing.” Why don’t you just look?”

He rolled his eyes but turned around and ran back up the stairs. A few seconds later he yelled, “I found it!”

Kate shook her head and smiled. Before she could yell for both of the boys to get a move on, her younger son, Jake, came running in from the backyard. His white baseball pants had grass stains on the knees.

“Jake, what the heck happened to your uniform? It was clean ten minutes ago.”

Jake looked down at his soiled clothes and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

“What were you doing out back?” Kate inquired, trying a different approach.

“I was checking on my worms.”

“Your worms?” she asked. Now Kate was scrunching up her face. She hated wiggly things.

“Yeah. Me and Sammy made a worm farm. Most of ‘em are still alive,” Jake exclaimed excitedly.”

“Sammy and I made a worm farm,” Kate corrected him.

“Sammy made a worm farm with you, too?” Jake asked.

Kate laughed, “No way,” she said. “I was correcting your grammar.”

“Oh, well anyways, me and Sammy are gonna take ‘em to school next week for show and tell.”

“Hmm,” she said, for lack of a better comment. It made her almost happy that her son and Sammy weren’t in her class. Kate was a fifth- grade teacher at the school Jake attended. Jake had just started fourth grade.

“That’s nice. Michael will be here any minute. Do you have all your gear in your bag?”

“Yep.”

“Did you finish your breakfast?”

“Yep.”

“Ah, the multi-faceted vocabulary of a nine-year-old,” she said with a grin.

“Huh?” Jake asked.

Kate laughed, “Never mind, buddy. Go grab your and your brother’s water bottles out of the fridge.”

Just about the time Jake headed to the kitchen, the doorbell rang.

“Come in,” Kate called, trying to get her own things together. She was due at the homeless shelter this morning, and she was running late.

“It’s not really safe to leave your front door unlocked and just yell, ‘Come in’ to any Tom, Dick or Harry who rings the doorbell, you know.”

Kate turned to look at Michael.

“But it wasn’t Tom, Dick or Harry. It was Michael.”

Michael came over to Kate and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I just worry about you and the boys.”

“I know you do, and we love you for it. I’ll do my best to remember to lock the door. Just to make you feel better.”

Michael had been Conner’s partner and best friend. Before Conner had died, Michael and his then wife, Lily, had been over all the time for barbecues, movies, and ball games, whatever. The two couples had been inseparable. After Conner’s death, Michael had become depressed and withdrawn. He had drunk too much, and he and Lily did nothing but fight. She had ultimately cheated on him with another officer from his department. Kate couldn’t understand it. You were supposed to stand by the ones that you love, not pull further away from them.

Michael was still a policeman, but because of his problems with alcohol and with his wife, not a very effective one. Michael and Lily had divorced after her affair was discovered, and, with Kate’s urgings, Michael had finally pulled himself up out of the abyss. He had gotten help also from the department, which had been threatening to take his job away. He saw a psychologist within the department and started dealing with the grief and conflicting emotions of guilt he had been feeling since the night Conner died. He also started spending a lot of time with Kate and Conner’s boys. He and Lily hadn’t had any children, and Michael had told Kate that being with the boys helped him hang onto a piece of his friend. It had given him a new lease on life, and it helped Kate out, freeing her to do other things she wanted or needed to do- like volunteering at a homeless shelter.

“You going to the shelter today?” Michael asked her.

“Yes,” she said, looking at the clock on the wall. “I’m running late, too. Do you mind if I take off?”

“Nope, go right ahead. I’ll round up the heathens, and we’ll head out to the game. Do you think you’ll make it for any of it?”

“I should be there before Cam’s game even starts,” she told him. The boys were in a baseball tournament this weekend. Normally, Kate wouldn’t have missed even a minute of a game, but they had both made the championships after she had already committed to working the breakfast shift at the homeless shelter this weekend.

“Thank you, Michael. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “You’ve got great kids.”

* * *

SECOND-CHANCE HOUSE
Later that morning

Kate rushed in the back door of the kitchen at the shelter.

A.J., the guy who ran the place said, with a grin in his words,“Oh, good of you to show up, Katie-did.

She smiled at him and said, “Are you kidding, A.J.? I wouldn’t miss your eggs and home fries for anything.”

A.J. grinned back and threw her a white apron. Katie had been volunteering here for five years now, and she knew her way around the kitchen better than most.

“Hey, Suzie,” she said to one of the younger girls there peeling potatoes. “Do you want me to relieve you and you can go set up the coffee or something out front?”

Suzie looked hesitant. She was new to the shelter, an indulged teen who had gotten into trouble with the law and had been remanded by the court to helping out at the shelter. So far, she had kept to the kitchen, doing things that allowed her to avoid having too much contact with any of the homeless folks they served. Besides the forty beds that A.J. offered here on a temporary basis, he would open the kitchen to everyone on the weekends and holidays and usually feed upwards of two hundred people in a day.

Kate had a feeling Suzie’s plan was to serve out her time in the back, but she knew from personal experience that she would get so much more out of her time here if she could meet these wonderful people and hear a few of the stories about how they had fallen on hard times. Kate herself had been surprised to find that that the homeless of the mean Chicago streets had not all been drug addicts and alcoholics their whole lives as most people callously assumed. There was so much more to them than that.

“Um…I’m doing okay here…” Suzie said.

Kate looked out towards the front. She saw a man come through the doors in a scruffy, old army jacket and a beat up New Orleans Saints’ hat. She wondered briefly if he had been displaced by Katrina and just never gotten back on his feet. Either way, she was sure that, like the others, he would have an interesting story to tell if and when he was ever ready.

“Go on out and get the coffee table ready, honey. It’ll do you good to meet some of these folks.” Kate used her teacher’s voice, and Suzie didn’t argue. Kate watched as the girl went out front. One of the older regulars, a man named Horace, who would alternate staying a week at the shelter and then one on the streets, said, “Thank you, Jesus. Coffee!” when he saw the girl with the big pot.

The man with the Saints’ hat hung back by the door like he hadn’t really committed to staying yet. By the time Kate had finished peeling the potatoes and A.J. was frying them up, the place was brimming with people. Suzie came back into the kitchen and said,

“The coffee’s all gone already.”

Kate smiled, “Yes, they do love their coffee. I’ll make some more. Why don’t you help Jake carry the eggs and biscuits out front?”

Kate took the giant pot over to the sink and sat it under the faucet. As she waited for it to fill up, she looked out front again. Horace was trying to engage the younger man with the hat in conversation, but the other man wasn’t having it. He had rudely turned his back on Horace in the middle of his conversation and was sipping his coffee, with his eyes darting here and there. Kate thought he looked a little paranoid and wondered if he were running...