Stories

A Homeless Man Took Shelter on My Porch for One Night, but What He Left Behind Brought Me to Tears

AQBy Avery QuinnOctober 4, 202637 min read

He was making stock.

He was in a kitchen.

He was somewhere.

I went back to my desk and worked through the morning and at lunch I texted Lily at school, which I did not usually do during the school day but which this seemed to warrant: Albert is at the shelter. He is helping with the cooking.

She texted back immediately, which meant she had her phone out during lunch, which was technically not allowed: I TOLD YOU he would be okay.

I smiled at my phone.

I texted back: you did.

She sent three soup emojis.

I put my phone in my drawer and went back to work.

The bread took three tries before we got it right. The first attempt was dense in a way that Estelle had warned about in a marginal note that said: if it doesn’t rise it’s either the yeast or the patience. We had used new yeast and determined it was the patience. The second attempt was better but the crust did not have the color Lily felt it should have based on her reading of the instruction until it is done. The third attempt she pulled from the oven and looked at it for a long moment and said: that is the color.

We ate it with butter and it was the kind of bread that is not complicated but is exactly right, the kind that makes you understand why Estelle had written it down.

I put a note in the margin: third try. Lily was right about the color. this is the bread.

The storage unit I returned to in September, on a Saturday, with a rented truck and the help of my friend Diane who had been helping me with things since the divorce with the patient persistent generosity of someone who understands that what a person in difficulty needs most is not advice but company. We loaded the chairs and the table into the truck and drove them to a family Diane knew through her church who had just moved into their first apartment and who had nothing in it yet. The chairs and table fit their kitchen exactly.

The sewing machine I kept.

I do not sew. But I have been thinking about learning, because Estelle’s notebook has a section in the back about mending, about the things you mend because replacing them would cost more than the mending, about the things you mend because they are worth mending, about the difference between the two categories and how to tell which is which. I have read this section more than once. I think there is something in it that goes beyond fabric.

The boxes of books I sorted on my porch over two October weekends, Lily helping, the two of us making piles: keep, donate, shelter. The shelter pile was the largest. Ruth said they always needed books.

Estelle’s boxes I went through alone.

She had saved things with the specificity of someone who understood that objects carry meaning and that meaning should not be lost carelessly. A small collection of recipes cut from newspapers and magazines and folded into a particular square, the same way you could tell they had all been folded by the same hands. Photographs of people I did not know and would never know. A set of letters bound with twine that I did not read because letters bound with twine are private things and I had not been given permission.

I packed the photographs and letters carefully and addressed them to Albert at the shelter and left them at the post office on a Monday morning with the hope that they would reach him and that receiving them would be, for him, the right kind of arriving.

A week later, a postcard came.

The front of the postcard was a photograph of a winter landscape, mountains and snow, the kind of postcard that is sold in tourist shops in small towns with views worth selling. On the back, in Albert’s firm handwriting:

The photographs arrived. Thank you. I had forgotten I still had my wife’s face. I have put the best one on the windowsill.

I put the postcard on the board in my kitchen, next to the photograph of Daniel that I still keep because Lily is in it and she was four in it and she has her father’s eyes in a way that I want her to know about even if everything else about it is complicated. Next to the postcard I put a small note I had written from Estelle’s notebook, the line about the things that are yours being yours because of the work, and the work still being yours.

The board is getting full.

I am not sure that is a problem.

The school clothes worked out. There was a sale in late August that I had been watching for and the timing was good and Lily came out of it with the three specific items she had indicated were necessary, the green jacket and the particular kind of jeans and the boots she had researched with the rigor of a professional consumer. She wore the green jacket on the first day of school and came home still wearing it, which I took as a good sign.

The job, as of October, appears to be secure. The budget discussions concluded and my position was not among those eliminated, which I learned in the specific way you learn these things in administrative offices, not through any formal announcement but through the gradual resumption of normalcy in the conversations around you, the absence of the particular quality of collective anxiety that had been present for several weeks. I have not stopped attending to the signals, because I have learned not to stop attending to signals, but the signals are currently quiet.

The rent is due in three days.

I have it.

I have it with enough left over that I was able to put a small amount into a savings account that I opened in September in my own name, a thing I had not had for twenty one years. It is not a large amount. But it is an account and my name is the only name on it and the number in it is the result of my own work and no one else’s decisions.

I found this unreasonably moving when the bank representative handed me the paperwork and I signed it and she asked if I had any questions and I said no and she said have a great day and I went out to my car and sat for a few minutes thinking about what it meant to have a thing that was mine in that unambiguous way.

I thought about Estelle: the things that are yours are yours because of the work.

Yes, I thought.

Yes.

Lily wants to go to the shelter on Fridays now, not every Friday but most of them, to help Ruth in the kitchen. Ruth said yes. I said yes. Lily said she wanted to learn to make the stock the way Albert made it, which Ruth described to us as unhurried and very particular about the temperature, a description that I found I could have predicted from the letter.

He is still there, as far as I know. Still in the kitchen. Ruth mentions him occasionally, not with great detail, with the specificity of someone who respects the privacy of the people in her care. She says he is doing well. She says he has taught two other residents to make a proper stock, which she considers an accomplishment.

She says he seems less tired than when he arrived.

I think about the porch and the storm and the folded quilt and the envelope under the doormat, and I think about what Albert said at the end of the letter: I hope your worries get smaller.

They have not gotten smaller in any absolute sense. They have become more manageable, which is a different thing, the difference between a weight that is unchanged and a person who has gotten stronger. I am getting stronger, slowly and in the way that only happens when you are doing the work and the work is what you have.

The notebook is on my nightstand now. I read a page or two most evenings before sleep, the way some people read scripture, looking for the part that applies to today. Some evenings I write in the margins. Some evenings Lily has already been there before me, a small notation in the handwriting of a ten year old who is learning to make stock, to let bread rise, to know when things are done.

Estelle said: if you are reading this, I hope you needed it.

I needed it.

I am still reading it.

I think I will be reading it for a long time.

Which seems, given everything, like exactly the right thing.

The elm trees outside are bare now.

In spring they will be green again, which is not a promise anyone made but which is, nonetheless, something I am counting on.

That is where I am.

Counting on the green.

That is not nothing. For where I started, that is quite a lot.

Estelle would understand that. Albert too.

I think they would both be pleased.