This story originally appeared in two parts
The door buzzed and Foy pulled it open. They went into the old convent and were immediately met by a pleasant looking woman.
“Hi, I’m Jenny. And you are?”
“I’m Foy Davis, and this is my daughter Hannah. This is our first time, so…”
“Okay, let me swipe your cards, then if you’ll wait over there, we’ll get started in a few minutes. I’ll probably put you with the babies since it’s your first time.”
There were two couches and some chairs around a coffee table, but they were all full. People were standing in the corners and leaning up against the walls. Most of them were African-Americans. Some Hispanics. Not many Anglos. Foy made eye contact with two men on a couch and smiled, but they didn’t smile back. They looked at him curiously, then started whispering. Foy wondered about this for a moment, then turned his attention elsewhere.
More people were coming through the doors. You could spot the volunteers because they all wore white badges with bar codes on them. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. They swiped their cards in the machine and chatted in little groups.
After a few minutes Jenny called them all over by the desk.
“Okay, it’s going to be a good night. There’s a lot of you here, which is wonderful. We’re very full right now. We have 45 families in the program.”
There was some light applause and a wave of enthusiastic whispering that made Foy feel better even though he wasn't sure what it was all about. He didn’t clap or say anything, but he did turn his lips down in a mock frown and nod thoughtfully.
Jenny continued. “Okay, is anyone doing computers?”
The two men from the couch gave quick waves and gathered some bags and a satchel before heading down the hall. Jenny turned to Foy and Hannah.
“I want you two to do the babies, okay? It’s a good way to get started. Go up those stairs to the second floor. Then look to your left. You’ll see where the little ones are. Find Caroline, and she’ll show you where to go.”
They headed for the stairwell. The building was in good condition, even though it was very old. The wooden rail on the wall was smooth from years of use, and the steps were worn in the middle. Foy thought about all the nuns who lived here before the Diocese sold the building. He imagined them going up and down the stairs in single file, silent and carrying little candles.
Hannah said, “I wish I wasn’t here. I mean, I’m glad we’re doing this and all, but I just wanted to be home, you know?”
She was pretty honest about stuff like that, more than he ever was with his dad. “Yeah, I know. Me too. But this is a good thing, and we’ll both be glad we did it.”
A woman met them at the top of the stairs.
“Hi, I’m Caroline, and you’re…” She looked at his badge. “Foy?” He nodded. “Is this your daughter?”
“Yes, this is Hannah.” Hannah flashed her nicest smile.
“Okay, I need at least one adult in the baby room with Shirley. I think we have enough people so we can have one-on-one in there tonight, which is good. At least one adult and maybe a teenager in there.”
Two other women and two teenage girls had come to the top of the stairs while she was talking. One of them looked at Foy and said, “Aren’t some of the babies scared of men?”
“No,” said Caroline. “That’s the toddlers.” She turned to Foy and spoke in a whisper. “Some of the toddlers CAN be a little afraid of men. You know, so many of them have been abused.”
Foy nodded gravely, but it sounded like the kind of information that gets passed from one generation of volunteers to the next. It might be true or it might not.
No one was making a decision, so Foy bumped his personality into a higher gear. “All right, we’ll take the babies.” Hannah looked pleased. She wanted to be with the babies.
“Great,” said Caroline. “It’s down the hall on the left.”
When they got to the room, he noticed an older woman with white hair fussing with a child in a high chair. He decided she must be Shirley and introduced himself and Hannah. She was too busy to say much, so he studied the room, trying to figure out how things worked in this place.
A large man with numerous tattoos and golf tees stuck through holes in his earlobes left a child in a crib and shoved a diaper bag in a cubby on the wall. A strip of masking tape on the cubby said, “Nathius.” A young man wearing basketball gear was putting a sleeping child in another crib. A woman in a hurry squeezed past him, and he noticed a dark-skinned girl with a wild shock of curly hair crying beside a rocking chair. She was old enough to stand, but only if she was holding onto something. It seemed likely that the woman who went past him was her mother.
Happy to have something to do, Foy walked over to the little girl and picked her up. He liked thinking that he was good with little girls since he had daughters himself. He talked softly to her in the voice he used for small children.
“Hey there little sweetie, c’mon now. It’s gonna be okay. I know you don’t know me, but I’m gonna hold you and everything’s gonna be all right.”
The little girl turned her head and stared at him. She had rheumy eyes, and the tender skin around them was swollen from crying. Clear mucous was coming out of her nose. The runny nose repulsed him briefly, but he knew that with children you just ignored stuff like that. If you ignore runny noses and just hold children, pretty soon they seem like your own kids and it doesn't matter.
She squirmed around a bit until she was facing him, then she put her arms around his neck and squeezed. He was surprised, but felt an immediate rush of pleasure and affection. He held her in the classic way. Chest to chest, with her head on his shoulder and his arms around her, hands clasped under her bottom. He swayed back and forth and made deep rumbling sounds. No words. Just sounds she would hear through his chest.
“That’s Danielle,” said Shirley, who was done with the child in the high chair. “She likes to be held. That’s a great rocker if you want to try it. It’s very smooth."
He looked around and noticed the glider. “Oh yeah, we had one of these. They’re great except sometimes I like the creaking of the old rockers when you’re trying to get kids to sleep.”
Shirley nodded. “Yeah.”
He sat in the glider and felt the pleasure of the little girl’s weight pressing on him. He had always loved that feeling of weight when he held his own girls. Without thinking, he turned his face to the right, straining his neck to kiss the top of her head. His little girls hadn’t had that much hair, so he was surprised to find her curls tickling his nose. Her hair smelled good. It smelled like soap. Not baby shampoo, just plain soap. If a baby’s hair smelled good, Foy always felt more affection for her.
Then another volunteer came in with a couple more babies. She introduced herself as Peggy. Foy realized that he had forgotten the older woman’s name and made a mental note to listen in case anyone said it. “Peggy, Peggy, Peggy,” he said to himself.
A teenage girl came in and sat in one of the rockers. She looked at Foy like she was trying to figure out who he was, so he said, “Hi, I’m Foy.”
“I’m Diven,” she said. “She likes to be held.” She lifted her chin quickly as she said this to indicate that she was talking about Danielle. Foy nodded and thought, “Diven, Diven, Diven.”
Diven pointed to one of the boys sleeping in a crib. “His name’s Wolfgang.”
Foy was delighted. “Really?”
There were five workers and five babies, so he decided he would just sit in the rocker and hold Danielle. It was a good way to spend his first night. Peggy said, “Shirley, did Nathius have a bottle?” Foy whispered, “Shirley, Shirley, Shirley” without moving his lips.
There was a nice time where no one said anything. And then Shirley said, “Aren’t they little angels? These babies don’t know they’re homeless. They’re just as happy as can be.”
There was something about what Shirley said that bothered Foy, but he didn’t feel like trying to figure out what it was.
“How long does this last?” he asked, in part to change the subject. But he didn’t want it to sound like he wanted to leave, so he said, “I mean, this is our first time. We really don’t know anything.”
Shirley took a deep breath and started talking about the history of the program and repeating a lot of general information they had already heard in orientation. It was specific information Foy was curious about, like how long they would be there. He hoped she wouldn't keep talking for a long time, but it seemed like she was going to.
“…then all the parents have to go to life skills classes every Tuesday, and that’s why we’re here. It depends. Some weeks we’re done by nine. Sometimes a little earlier.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked around at the little room. “This used to be a convent, didn’t it?” He asked this even though he knew the answer.
“Yes, it did. These were the nun’s quarters. Every nun had her own room, and each room had it’s own bathroom too.” Shirley seemed pleased that each nun had her own bathroom, as if that was very extravagant for nuns.
Foy looked around the room and noticed that there wasn’t a bathroom. Shirley seemed to notice the same thing and continued. “Although I think this might have been a study room. There were study rooms scattered throughout, as I understand it. This might have been one of them.”
Foy didn’t say anything after that. He watched Hannah with amusement. She had gotten over her initial discomfort and was holding a little boy on her lap and talking to him. She liked babies, but she was still a little awkward and unsure around them. Diven acted very sure of herself until she had to change a dirty diaper. Her finger slipped and she got “some” under her nail. She spent the rest of the evening sniffing her finger, muttering, and scrapping underneath it with a pencil point.
Danielle’s weight grew limp, and Foy could tell that she was asleep. He closed his eyes and enjoyed her heaviness. He thought he might like to come back to the baby room again on other Tuesdays, but he wondered if he would get the chance. He had the feeling that men didn't usually get assigned to the babies because of what the woman said in the hall.
The parents started showing up about 8:45. Danielle’s mother was the last to come. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her when she left the room, and in his mind he had decided she was African-American because Danielle had very dark skin. He was surprised to see that she was Hispanic.
Foy felt the two of them had a bond of some kind. He was looking forward to telling her what a sweet little girl Danielle was, but the woman seemed angry or perhaps just preoccupied. Some of the other parents had said “thank you,” as they left, but she just grabbed Danielle without saying a word or even making eye contact. The little girl was startled awake and whisked out of the room before he could see if she was going to start crying.
For a moment he was a little irritated, but then he thought about what had happened. He had a little conversation in his mind. “She comes here every Tuesday night, and there are different volunteers each week. And she might even be a little embarrassed, so don’t worry about it.”
Divan was already gone, so he chatted a moment with Shirley and Peggy before heading to the stairs with Hannah. Caroline saw them and asked how it went.
“I held Danielle the whole time, and she just laid there on my shoulder.”
“Yeah,” said Hannah. “She was adorable. She hugged him the whole time.”
Caroline smiled and said, “Aww, you know she likes being held because she doesn’t get held very much, bless her heart. Her mom’s all alone, and she has four other children.”
Foy stared at her. Suddenly everything that had happened that evening was erased and redrawn in his mind. He saw the woman push past him when he first arrived and remembered that a couple of other kids had been hurrying along at her feet. And there were children hanging onto her pants when she lifted Danielle to take her away. And now she was gone into the night, taking Danielle back to a world where an exhausted young woman tries to care for five children all by herself.
Foy looked at Hannah who was shaking her head with real concern, and a memory popped into his head. When Hannah was small she heard, “Let me hold you” so many times that she thought “hold you” was a verb. She would stand with her little hands in the air when she wanted to be held and say, “Hold you me!”
And now Foy saw Danielle as a little starving girl and himself as a rich man who tossed her a piece of bread one evening. It was a nice thing to do, but in the long run it wasn’t going to help anything. One night of holding her wasn’t going to make any difference. She needed to be held every day.
A wave of hopelessness began to come over him, and it seemed like there were so many people in the shelter. The lobby was full of them, volunteers with their white badges and the families taking their kids down the halls to their rooms. It was too much for him to take in, especially since he really didn’t understand all that was going on. He only knew about the baby room and Danielle.
He walked with Hannah out the front door and into the cold night. Steam came out of their mouths, and he began to feel happy again.
“Let’s get a treat at the gas station and watch “The Simpsons” when we get home, whaddya think?”
“All right!” she said with enthusiasm. Getting treats and watching “The Simpsons” was a big deal for them.
“I say we should make it a tradition and do it every time we're here.”
“Cool!”
He tried to put his arm around her and draw her close, but there were a lot of people around, and she didn’t want that. “Dad!” she said, pulling away. She had a way of saying it nicely so that he knew it was only because she didn’t want to be seen hugging him in the parking lot. Foy knew that she had been held enough in her life and that it was supposed to be this way.
“I know,” he said, and he didn’t feel at all bad about it.

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