The Boys Upstairs (Father Jay Book 2) Page 3

  Louis was almost bouncing on the couch, Jamie bumping against him. “What did he do?”

  Jay told them about Ignatius Loyola, how he was so vain that when he saw his broken leg was set crooked, he'd had his leg broken again to re-set it, and how during recovery he'd changed his mind and become a soldier for God instead; how he'd founded a group that sent priests wherever they were needed all over the world. He told them how another injured soldier had changed the world.

  Because that night, Jay had been just as enthralled. He didn't get any sleep at all as he devoured the chapter one letter at a time, and then the next. By the end of August he had finished the entire volume, and several days later, steeling himself, he picked up the Bible. Again he opened at random. He read Mark 3:13.

  “Jesus went up the mountain and summoned those whom he wanted, and they came to him.”

  Jay had shut the book and lain still for an hour.

  Louis said, “He just called anyone he wanted, and they came?”

  Jay nodded. “Just like that.”

  Maria said, “No one ever wanted us. They wish we'd never been born.”

  “I want you here,” said Jay.

  Ten years ago, that had been the first time he'd thought anyone had wanted him, too. Wounded and damaged, he'd had no more use in this world. His old friends had forgotten him. His family visited so infrequently that he could hear the renewed pain in their voices every time they saw him, as if they forgot between visits that fate had done the equivalent of running his life through a lawn mower. The army couldn't use him any longer.

  By extension, God didn't need him to do anything—Jay knew that by rights he ought to have died in the Jeep. But what he'd just read belied that: God called those he wanted, not those he needed. And maybe, just maybe, Jay had survived for a reason. Maybe because he was wanted.

  “And that's why you're here now,” Jay said. “If God called you and you came, I'm not sending you away. Even if God called and you didn't hear it, you're with me now. If you try to escape, you can always come back. But for now, I need to ask you to stay, at least until the sun's up and it's a bit warmer out there.”

  Maria and Louis looked at one another.

  “Can you do that for me?” Jay said.

  Louis nodded. Maria consented as well.

  “Then go back upstairs and get some sleep,” Jay said. “I'll show you around the church in the morning, and you can decide if you want to stay after all.”

  Four

  Jay shut off the alarm clock fifteen minutes before it would have rung on December 23rd. The lineup of things to do stretched before him like a thousand car freight train, and his brain kept reviewing it all. By 5:00 he had showered, and now he stood in his kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew. The drops emerged from the percolator one at a time, and he squinted at the coffee uneasily. His heavy glasses still didn't make the image clear. He'd realize when the coffee finished by the sound of the steam, but he watched anyhow.

  Eventually he'd have to give up coffee. At four dollars a pound, he could hardly justify the luxury much longer. Last year, Lent had coincided with the day he'd run out of coffee, so he'd clenched his teeth and called it a sign from God. Holly must have sensed, somehow, because on Easter morning she'd arrived with a gift from the Easter Bunny, enough coffee to keep him stocked through summer. He shouldn't have taken it, knowing how hard she worked, but with that practical insistence of hers, she'd forced him. Looking at the coffee pot now, he had the sinking feeling of a guilty pleasure. He was pretty sure God was asking him to give up coffee because every time he thought about it, he tried to come up with a way out.

  Pushing the glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, he smirked. The coffee and the contact lenses—those were the last two big expenses he ought to eliminate from his budget. He'd never had much faith in budgets, and he'd laughed when they made him take a business administration course in seminary, but he really needed it running this parish. His tendency would have been to add up all the expenses at the end of the year and pretend those were his projections to begin with, but the diocese didn't allow it.

  This church was too poor to make the numbers work. Jay had taken his diocesan salary, pathetic as it might be, and thrown more than half of it into the parish's income column. That put Jay's personal income well under five figures, but sacrifice got easier once he started translating the dollars into pounds of rice or beans or spaghetti. During the difficult moments, Jay tried to imagine the fifteen or twenty faces who would be denied food so he could have coffee, more heat, or a longer shower. (No one had ever noticed the bell timer in the bathroom, thank goodness.)

  The soup kitchen put them in the red nearly every month. It didn't matter. He always found a way. After staring down Iraqi gun-barrels, he wasn't about to let a little addition and subtraction stop him.

  Jay dragged his thoughts back to the immediate problems of today, December 23rd. Laundry was just as easy now as it had been in the army: Jay had gone from one profession to another where he seldom had to decide what to wear in the morning. The black clothes, unfortunately, required ironing, and that he had to take care of before he could start the day.

  Shortly after Jay began ironing, the window slid up and a scrawny blond boy wriggled through, admitting a blast of wind. Jay didn't turn his head. “Hi, Masa.”

  “Hey, man, help me out.” Masa dropped his book bag on the floor and started unbuttoning his shirt. “The headmaster said if I showed up all wrinkled one more time, I'm suspended, and Mom didn't iron nothing anyhow. It's only a half day before Christmas break, so she said it didn't matter.”

  Jay finished a black shirt while Masa handed him his smaller white one “And that would be a shame, after how many people we begged to get you a scholarship.”

  “You won't have to beg nobody next year, though. We get report cards today. I think I'm going to get an A in English, man!” Masa grinned. “You saw last semester I got all Bs and Cs. I never got a C before!”

  Jay looked at him sidelong to catch that moment of embarrassed delight in the boy's eyes. While smart, Masa had never applied himself in grammar school. Jay had pulled enough strings to get him admitted to the local Catholic middle school, but the admissions board had been understandably wary: he'd had over a hundred absences the year before. The second chance was paying off. With only ten absences so far, Masa might well get a free ride next year. A few other Archangels already attended the middle school, and Masa had started a chapter over there, policing the school grounds much as the first group patrolled the church.

  Jay looked at the boy sitting on the steps adjusting his red armband. “Should you be wearing a gang emblem to school?”

  “Who's going to take it off me?”

  Jay tossed Masa the warm, pressed shirt. “I was thinking about the faculty. Make sure you get the bus on time.”

  “Yeah.” Masa stopped buttoning his shirt to think a minute. “You know, you'd have been a cool dad.”

  “I am a dad,” Jay said as Masa let himself back outside through the basement window. “I've got all you guys.”

  Plus a gal. We really need to find a place for those kids. They can't stay here. What an ugly, fallen world, if small children had to face homelessness or separation. Oh, God, just let them be safe until we find them a decent place.

  And decent food. And warm clothes without holes.

  Jay checked his watch. Maybe Kevin was home now—and if so, he was definitely still asleep. Waking him with a phone call would be decidedly unchristian, but Jay took a momentary satisfaction in imagination. “It's six o'clock in the morning, and I still have two kids sleeping on wood floors upstairs with no blanket and no pillows. What's that? You say I rousted you out of your warm full-size bed in your heated second story apartment with the balcony and the wall-to-wall carpeting?”

  Ah, yes. Shades of the best his childhood had to offer, but no, he'd call Kevin later. It would help to know if the kids had any belongings they could scavenge, if Kevin could look
into their previous foster homes and find some toiletries. Did they even have any toys? Maybe a stuffed animal would make the nights less lonely for the youngest two. Maybe their previous caretakers had never bothered with that kind of stuff.

  The powerless are the ones who suffer when there's not enough to go around, God, and no one's more powerless than our children. The Gospels talked about Jesus taking a small child on his lap and saying the kingdom of heaven belonged to children like this. Children like Nick, furious at the injustice of the world; children like Maria whose parents had abandoned them; children like Masa, denied the resources for a decent start in life. Children like Eddie, who wanted to succeed so badly and were never given even a first chance.

  Thursday was grocery day, and with eleven homeless kids to feed, Jay wondered if he could get all of the necessary items into the trunk of a car. He didn't own a vehicle because the municipal government frowned on legally blind people driving, but since Holly worked second shift she had volunteered to drive him weekly for groceries, tithing out of her time what she couldn't from income.

  This morning, Holly only laughed as she unloaded a couple of blankets, pillows and towels from the back seat of her beat-up compact. “Maybe next time I should bring your brother's police van instead.”

  As they drove, Holly said, “Tell me what you want for Christmas.”

  Jay shrugged. “I don't want anything.”

  “You live on a handful of change a week, and this is an excuse to get you one of the luxury items you refuse to buy yourself.” Holly wore a no-nonsense look that usually tamed the boys upstairs. “So don't give me the 'I don't want anything' routine. You're going to get something. It might as well be something you want.”

  “The parish office could use—”

  “For Pete's sake, Jay!” Holly pulled into a Burger-Haven drive-through. “Let God figure out how to get the parish office more canary yellow typing paper or an extra box of staples. I'm talking about you. You. Jay.” She stuck her head out the window and called to the drive-through speaker, “Big Topper junior meal with a small diet cola.” She looked at Jay. “You want anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  She put her head back out the window. “One Big Topper extra value meal with a cola, and super-size the fries.”

  As Holly idled to the window, Jay said, “I was wondering why you even bother asking me.”

  “Because someday you'll get tired of me guessing what you'd like and guessing wrong.”

  “That's going to backfire if I honestly have no preference, of course.”

  “That's not the point. What I want is to help. I'm not going to break your vow of poverty by getting you a Christmas gift. Just tell me what you need. You're the only person I could give something to and know it matters.”

  Holly paid for the meal, handed Jay the paper bag, and pulled out onto the road again. Jay ate quickly. While he didn't dwell on it, he had felt hungry.

  Holly huffed. “You all but bleed to save everyone else's life. Why are you making my life difficult?”

  Jay said, “A can opener.”

  Holly glanced his way. “A can opener.”

  Jay shook his head. “No, not a regular can opener. You know, the kind you plug in.”

  “An electric can opener.”

  “Right.”

  “I'll get you a can opener on the way home. What do you want for Christmas?”

  “Up until a minute ago,” Jay said with amusement, “I thought I wanted a can opener.”

  “But that's—”

  “You asked what I could use. Sometimes it hurts my hands to turn the regular one.”

  Holly breathed sharply. Jay couldn't make out the expression on her face, but he imagined her silence was a horrified one. She made such a little issue out of his disabilities that sometimes he imagined she forgot them entirely. “I'll get it for you. But I have to get you more than that.”

  Jay fixed a pointed gaze on her. “Okay. Then give me a totally non-commercial Christmas. Give me a holiday where people haven't forgotten the 'Holy' in the middle of skittering hither and yon to find thirty-five of that perfect gift, color-coordinating their wrapping paper with their living-room decor, igniting seventy-five thousand watts of Christmas Spirit on their front lawn, and creating choirs of store-owners gathered around their cash registers singing 'What A Friend We Have In Jesus.'“

  Holly didn't answer. Jay huffed.

  A half mile down the road, Jay said, “What does your restaurant do with the leftover bread at the end of the day?”

  “We toss most of it. Sometimes the kitchen staff takes it home. The manager is pretty tight and we usually don't have much.”

  “The Archangels said that Gino's bakery isn't having as much left over at the end of the day any longer. We've been counting on bread donations to keep the soup kitchen running for a while now, and the boys eat like crazy.” Jay took a deep breath. “Could you ask about the expired food and day-old bread? They'd get the tax write-off, and we'd get some more people fed. I was hoping you could persuade them to help out.”

  Holly laughed. “Because I'm such a high-powered individual there?”

  “Because they're decent human beings?”

  “I wouldn't go that far.” Holly shrugged. “Donations are way down?”

  “It's the Christmas spirit. Everyone's picking out plastic singing toys to drop in the collection bins at the Salvation Army. But the poor still need to eat.”

  So, apparently, did everyone else. The grocery store parking lot was filled out to the very last spaces. Holly dropped off Jay at the front entrance while she went to park in what she referred to as the “north 40.” Standing beside a mailbox, Jay listened to snippets of conversations. Most walked in alone, shopped alone, and returned home alone. More than three couples were arguing about their menus as they entered the store, and several moms were having a hard time corralling their children. Jay smothered a smile as one mom reminded her daughter to use her “shopping manners.”

  He squinted at the advertisements, printed huge enough that even he could read them. Shrimp a bargain at $6.99 a pound, cuts of prime rib that cost thirty dollars on sale. “Get a free turkey with a purchase of $150.” Actually, that may not be a bad idea. I wonder if I could get someone to roast a turkey for the kids upstairs. I wonder if that oven actually works. You can't microwave a turkey, can you?

  Holly arrived, her gloved hands shoved into her pockets. “Let's get started. You should have waited inside where it's warmer.”

  “Is it possible to microwave a turkey?”

  As the automatic doors slid open, Holly said, “Right now I'd crawl inside the microwave with it.”

  After they finished grocery shopping, Holly packed the car, and Jay scanned the parking lot. It wouldn't pay to approach this store's manager again, especially on a day when the man had already wrestled (figuratively—Jay hoped) so many irate customers, scammers and folks who wanted to use expired coupons, unverified checks, or maxed credit cards. He'd actually seen one manager called over to deal with a customer who simply “wanted a discount.” No other reason. Just, “I want a discount.”

  Jay had already worked over as many of the local proprietors as he could, trying to find jobs for the boys. So many times when he entered a business, he received the same dour look, the blankness, the unthinking denial.

  No doubt any request for a job would be met with, “Are you nuts?”

  But maybe he should try again. For Eddie's sake, maybe he should give it one more shot.

  If nobody will give these boys a job because they're not good in the eyes of the world, how can they become good in the eyes of the world? His own wild youth seemed so different. At least his family had been intact, a warm place to sleep at whatever hour of the morning he'd returned home. He didn't pry into their pasts, but Jay assumed he'd done far worse than the kids he housed now. Certainly with less excuse. He'd been almost feral, arrested twice for petty theft, possessing a weapon and DUI, always let off the hook
by his father's connections. He'd refused to attend college, instead enlisting in the Army just in time for the Gulf War where he had driven his truck over a land mine. Praise God for land mines.

  Five

  “Thank goodness,” Jay said as Holly pulled in to the church parking lot. “Kevin's car. I hope he brought sleeping bags for the kids.”

  Holly parked. “Did he say he would?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What did he say, exactly?”

  “I think he exactly said, 'Do you have any idea what time it is?' It was eight in the morning. I told him he missed a beautiful sunrise.”

  Holly choked on a laugh.

  Jay started to unload the groceries but was stopped momentarily by three of the older boys who pushed him out of the way. “Try not to eat it all before it gets into the fridge,” he called after them as they competed to see which of them could haul the largest number of bags up the stairs at the same time. Holly hid her mouth in her hands as she laughed.

  Kevin came out of his car and joined them. “The church secretary said you would be back around now.”

  “Mrs. D. knows all,” Jay said. “What did you bring the boys?”

  “A couple of the guys from the precinct went to the kids' group home last night and found some clothes for them and a couple of toys, some stuffed animals. They didn't have much, but you've got some bedding now at least.” Kevin shook his head. “When they got removed from their parents, apparently there was no food in the cabinets and only four pillows for the five of them, but a widescreen TV and a stereo surround sound system.”

  Holly's eyes widened. “What kind of priorities are those?”

  Jay stared at a crack in the pavement. “I think it's clear where the priority was.”

  “Crystal clear,” said Kevin. “I could tell you all about women who show up at the station house asking for help because they can't afford to buy food this week, but they have their nails done and their hair permed, and their nine-year-old girl is walking in behind them with her nails done and her hair permed too.”