No Place (12 page)

“How come?”

“We’ll chat about your current situation.”

*  *  *

Had this happened to Meg, too? For the next few periods I kept an eye out for her. Maybe she could give me an idea of what I was in for. But seventh period arrived before she did.

When I got to the counseling office, Ms. Reuben wasn’t alone. Coach Buder and Mrs. Collins, the school psychologist, were also there. “Have a seat, Dan,” Ms. Reuben said cheerfully.

What’s Buddha doing here?
I wondered.

Ms. Reuben interlaced her fingers and leaned forward with a smile. She was a hefty lady with rosy cheeks. “So, how are you?” she asked, like this was just some friendly get-together.

“Fine, thanks.”

She nodded as if that was what she’d expected me to say.

“And your family?” asked Mrs. Collins, looking concerned through her large, round glasses.

“They’re fine. We’re all fine. Look, whatever’s going on is just temporary, okay? It’s not like I’m the only kid in school who . . . who doesn’t have a place to live right now.”

“We understand,” Ms. Reuben said with a phony smile. “We just want to make sure you’re okay. Are you getting enough to eat?”

“Yes.”
Even if I was accepting handouts from the lunch ladies.

“Did you know you probably qualify for the free breakfast and lunch program here at school?” added Mrs. Collins.

The bus circle was right outside the cafeteria, so every morning the free breakfast kids were on display for everyone who took a bus. I couldn’t imagine myself being part of that spectacle.

On the other hand, free lunch sounded great as long as some gong didn’t ring every time I got one. “I wouldn’t mind free lunch, thanks.”

“Excellent.” Mrs. Collins wrote something down on a pad. You could see it made her feel good to be able to help. “Do you need an address?”

“Sorry?”

“For your mail. We can arrange for you to get it here.”

“Oh, uh, thanks, but my dad got us a post office box.”

“Do you take the school bus, Dan?” Ms. Reuben asked.

“Not if I can avoid it.”

“We recently arranged for a stop . . . so that it’s not immediately obvious where you’re living? It was a bit tricky because officially, you no longer live in the school district.”

“But of course you can stay and finish the year,” Mrs. Collins added hastily.

That was a jolt. It had never occurred to me that if you had to move because you were homeless, you might have to change schools, too.

“We’d also like you to get a free yearbook,” said Ms. Reuben as if I’d just won a prize on some game show. “You won’t have to pay for a ticket to the winter formal and we can give you an extra locker.”

Huh?
“So I’ll have a place to stay at night?”

Buddha grunted like he was trying to suppress a laugh. Mrs. Collins shot him a dirty look, then said, “Some students find they need space for extra things.”

That made me wonder. “How many of us are there?”

Mrs. Collins and Ms. Reuben shared a quick glance.

“Let’s focus on you,” said Mrs. Collins.

“Is it a secret?” I asked.

“It’s a sensitive issue.”

“In other words, more than people think?”

“So . . . we heard there was an incident at lunch yesterday?” Mrs. Collins changed the subject.

I knew that would come up. “Yeah, my bad. Kind of lost it. One of those perfect storm things, you know? I mean, the kid’s okay, right? All I did was grab his shirt.”

From the silence that followed, I could tell that my response had caught them off guard. Finally Mrs. Collins crossed her legs and leaned forward with an earnest expression. “Dan, giving a glib acknowledgment of what happened doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve accepted the pathology behind it.”

Excuse me?

“None of us can remember you doing anything like that before,” added Ms. Reuben.

“Yeah, well, I was never homeless before.”

The slightest smile appeared on Buddha’s lips, but he quickly crushed it.

“So you acknowledge your current situation had something to do with it?” Mrs. Collins asked.

“I sure hope so,” I said.

The school psychologist’s forehead wrinkled. “You
hope
so?”

“I’d hate to think I’d do something like that for no reason.”

Buddha smiled again and both women gave him a murderous look.

“Dan, the purpose of being here isn’t to demonstrate how
skilled you are at finessing your way out of what happened,” Ms. Reuben said. “Things like that occur for a reason. And we’re concerned.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, seriously? Being in my situation sucks. I’m not gonna pretend it doesn’t. But I think so far I’ve handled it pretty well. Yeah, yesterday I blew it. But here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe instead of putting me under a microscope for every little mistake . . . instead you could cut me some slack? I know what I did was wrong, but I caught myself, right? Did it ever occur to you to put a positive spin on this? Like, ‘Hey, Dan, we’re proud of how you handled the situation yesterday. Someone else might have let it get out of control, but you really nipped it in the bud. Way to go, dude.’ ”

Buddha smiled
and
nodded with approval, which constituted about the biggest display of emotion on his part that I could ever recall. Both Ms. Reuben and Mrs. Collins gave him cold glares.

“We just want to make sure there isn’t something more we can do to help,” said Mrs. Collins.

“Hey, I’ll take the free lunch and the extra locker, but unless you can find my parents jobs and a place to live, what else is there?”

“What we
can
do is be here for you,” Ms. Reuben said. “We want you to feel like you can come to us with any concern or problem, okay?”

“Uh, sure, thanks.”

Mrs. Collins checked her watch. “I guess that’s all.”

As we got up, out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Collins exchange a look with Buddha, as if it was now his turn to step up. He and I left the office together and went out into the hall.

“They brought you in to be the closer?” I asked.

Coach Buder shrugged. “Moral support.”

“Seriously, coach, I’m coping. What else is there to say?”

I’d meant the question to be rhetorical, but Buddha paused and gazed out the windows. It was windy, and bright swarms of orange, yellow, and red leaves swirled past. “You know how they say playing outfield is the loneliest position in baseball?” he asked. “Well, I think it’s pitcher. When you’re on the mound, it’s all on your shoulders.”

Coach Buder glanced back down the hall at the counseling office. “What you have to do on the field is difficult enough, Dan. Don’t make it hard for yourself off the field too. If you need help, ask for it, okay? You don’t have to do it all alone, and you shouldn’t try.”

 20 

A PHONE CALL

“Have you decided?”

“I’d like to know what you’re planning.”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Exactly what do I get if I help you?”

“A place to live.”

“What kind of place?”

“A house, with enough of a yard for a nice garden.”

“In the school district?”

“Yes. So, are you going to help me, or not?”

“If I do, how do I know you’ll keep your half of the bargain?”

“I’ll have no choice. You’ll know something about me that I won’t want anyone else to know.”

“I see . . . all right. I think I can put you in touch with the kind of person you’re looking for.”

 21 

Whap!
The pistol-shot smack of the catcher’s mitt reverberated through the air when Noah caught the pitch I’d just thrown. In my mind my conversation with Buddha the day before was more motivation to begin pitching again.

But while things felt good on the pitching mound, they didn’t feel so great back “home.” It was the Friday of our second week in Dignityville and Mom had started working on the new garden, planting fall vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and beets. Later that evening in the dim light of the dining tent you could see that her face was rosy and glowing after a day of physical labor. But beside her Dad looked pale and grim as he told us the Subaru’s transmission was shot and we didn’t have the money to repair it.

“The guy at the junkyard will give me a couple hundred bucks for it,” he said.

We’d lost our house. Now we were losing our car. A couple
hundred bucks wouldn’t last long. It was starting to feel like we’d be stuck in Dignityville forever. With Talia’s voice echoing in my ears, I asked if he’d come across any job possibilities.

“There’s nothing out there,” he said.

But there has to be something
, I thought. “You mean, nothing that pays better than unemployment?”

Dad and Mom exchanged a furtive look, then Dad said, “Unemployment ran out.”

That’s how I learned we were applying for food stamps and something called TANF—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—which was basically just another name for welfare. My parents said they would use the food stamps for their breakfasts and lunches, but I wished we could have used them that night, because someone got the Dignityville menu mixed up and the result was hot dogs, creamed spinach, and beets.

“Remind me not to be homeless in my next lifetime,” our neighbor Fred grumbled good-naturedly when he and his wife, Diane, joined us in the dining tent.

“Now, now, Fred,” Diane teased. “You’re the one who’s always saying beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Maybe, but you never heard me say it when I was hungry.”

Meg sat down with us and had started to eat when Joel came by.

“Know where Aubrey is?” he asked.

“He’s working tonight.”

Joel made a face. “I was hoping he could help me with the bikes.”

“I’ll help you,” Meg said. “Just let me finish dinner.”

“You’re a good little sister,” Diane said after Joel left.

“I’ve been well trained,” Meg replied, and then told us stories about what it was like having Aubrey for a big brother. Like how, when she was eight, she had to be a vegan because
he
was going through
his
vegan period, and when she was eleven he made her feel so guilty about her favorite leather cowboy boots that she’d stopped wearing them, and everything else that came from animals.

Meg could be pretty funny when she felt like it, and everyone except Dad laughed. At the end of dinner she asked me if I wanted to join her helping Joel, but I was on cleanup detail again and after that Talia and I were supposed to go to Jen’s birthday party at Wally’s Wowza-Burger. Gradually the others left the table. Fred and Diane headed back to their tent and Mom went to babysit Stella so that Mona could go to work. Soon it was just me and Dad, who sat with his head in his hands, looking morose.

“You okay?” I asked, concerned.

He looked up. Maybe it was the dim light, but his eyes looked deep and hollow. “Oh, yeah, for a total failure I’m great.”

That caught me by surprise. He’d never sounded so utterly defeated before.

“No,” I said. “You’ve been a damn good father.”

“And look where we’ve wound up.” He gestured around the dining tent.

“It’s not you, it’s the economy.”

Dad shook his head slowly. “I let this happen. I know Mom
says she’s happy, but she just wants to see the good side of everything.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. We’ll figure something out.”

Dad stared at the table and didn’t reply.

“Listen,” I said. “If you’re a failure, so is every parent who ever stayed home to raise their kids. And how can you say you’re a failure? What about all those inner-city kids you kept from joining gangs?”

“The program’s gone. What do you think those kids are doing now?” He hung his head. Seeing him so depressed made me feel guilty that I’d ever gotten angry at him for allowing us to wind up here. Not everyone was born to be a great businessman. In his own way he’d done the best he could, and no matter what he said now, he probably
had
made a difference for a lot of those disadvantaged kids.

And there was something else. “Hey, I wouldn’t be going to Rice next year if it wasn’t for you.”

Dad looked up and the corners of his mouth rose with pride. “Yeah.” But the smile was brief and was soon replaced by a faraway look. “I ever tell you that senior year of high school was probably the best time I ever had? From the second I got accepted on early admission it was one big party.” His lips firmed. “Meanwhile
you
get to spend senior year in a tent. . . . You deserve better, Dan. You really do.”

I’m not sure I’d ever seen Dad so down. Even though I was supposed to be cleaning up the dining room, I sat there with him, afraid to let him be alone. Outside, people were still
coming home from work. I couldn’t get used to the idea that you could have a full-time job and still be homeless, but the evidence was all around us. Of course, there were the others—disheveled, with tattered clothes, missing teeth, unshaven and unsteady, the ones you suspected weren’t exactly following the Dignityville rules about sobriety.

I’d once looked down on people like that. To be honest, I’d felt superior. But not anymore.

Dad rose up from his seat. “You better get to work.”

“Sure you’ll be okay?” I asked.

He smiled weakly. “Don’t worry about me.”

As I started across the dining tent, I glanced at the TV in the back. Now that dinner was over, the usual crowd had gathered for the evening’s entertainment. The local news was on and they were reporting that the police had just discovered a beating victim behind Ruby’s Bar and Grill. He’d been identified as the restaurant’s bartender.

  PART TWO  

 22 

It’s pouring outside the emergency room. Meg and I stand under the canopy, chilled by the cold mist as rain roars down. Dignityville is nearly three miles away, and we’ll get soaked if we try to walk. There’s a cab at the curb . . . if only I had money for the fare.