Los Angelenos had an almost fatalistic acceptance of the capricious fires, floods, mudslides, and earthquakes that nature visited upon them, but the slightest inconvenience would get them utterly bent out of shape—and rain was definitely not their favorite thing.
Francis watched them scurry to the sleek protection of Mercedes Benzes, Lexuses, and Jaguars in the Mrs. Gooch’s parking lot. Other pretty people huddled inside the warmth of the upscale health food supermarket, waiting for a break in the downpour. Francis sat alone under an umbrella, watching the rain puddling around his table. There would be no more interest in anything animal today. He might as well go and pick up Silva.
It might be good for them to get an early night; Silva was nursing a miserable migraine, yet nothing he could say could dissuade her from going to Malibu. “It’s the day before Thanksgiving, Francis,” she said. “It could be our biggest so far.”
He respected her common-sense assessment. But then Francis had come to admire a lot about the lady since he began working with her. Every morning at 7:00 A.M. he could count on finding Silva in the lobby of the Holiday Inn ready to go, and she rarely quit before 7:00 P.M. He remembered how, that first month, they had laughed about how much the muscles in their cheeks ached from smiling all day.
Francis liked her caring and gentleness. From the very first week, people stopped to ask advice and help with their pets’ problems. Silva always listened with patient empathy. Then, no matter what kind of day she had had, when they dragged back to the hotel, Silva would stand by his side at the public phones—it was far too expensive to dial from their rooms—returning calls left on their answering service, often until after 9:00 P.M.
Many a night, they didn’t get to eat until 10:00. Sometimes they were just too tired to bother. When they did sit down, it didn’t hurt that Silva was even more cost-conscious than himself. Francis remembered smiling the first time she suggested they never spend more than five dollars on a meal. They ate a lot of storefront Chinese. He smiled a lot around Silva, he had come to realize. And Goldilocks positively adored her.
Francis accelerated onto the Santa Monica Freeway, ignoring the angry blare of horns as he shot into the stream of rush-hour traffic. Making time along Pacific Coast Highway would be even more of a challenge than usual with the rain this afternoon. He hoped Silva would be ready to leave when he arrived. He would pick up some soup and insist she go right to her bed when they got to the hotel.
A watery sun struggled victoriously through a black shelf of clouds as Francis slid into a parking space at Hughes Market. He spotted Silva immediately. She had set up shop under the covered colonnade that fronted the giant food store. Goldilocks sat by her side, as adorable as only a slightly scruffy golden rug of a dog could be.
Francis strolled up behind them as a child pulled her mother toward the terri-poo. “Hello,” he heard his teammate’s cultured tones. “Do you like animals?”
The mother hesitated and averted her eyes while her daughter enfolded the stoic Goldilocks as if the dog were a stuffed teddy bear. “Are your pictures going to frighten my little girl?”
Smiling, Silva tendered a photo of Sparkles and Goatie trotting side by side in the meadow under Angels Landing. “We’d rather show you happiness than pain.”
The child suddenly popped her head above the table and grabbed a picture of Ginger. “Mommy, can I have this one?”
“Now, dear,” the mother chided. “You already have two dogs.”
“I’ll send you a letter from Ginger if you’d like, and that way it will be like you’ve adopted her.”
The girl’s mother studied the photo of the old mare and her goat friend. “I have horses,” she said. “I know how much a bale of hay costs.” She slipped a chic, miniature backpack with a discreet Prada insignia from her shoulders and rummaged inside. “This may help,” she dropped a rolled note into Silva’s donation jar
As if on cue, Goldilocks threw back her head. “Oww. Oww. Oww.”
“She’s saying, thank you,” Silva beamed.
“She’s saying she spotted me,” Francis said, reaching her side as the mother and daughter pushed into the supermarket.
“Francis, what are you doing so early? Did you see? She left us a fifty-dollar bill! Oh, I’ve had such a good day! Wait till I tell you.”
“Mine wasn’t bad.” Francis knelt to hug a frantic Goldilocks pawing his thigh for attention. “So let’s call it quits. You were feeling rotten this morning, remember?”
“Not just yet. Do you see those two women to our right?”
Francis glanced down the colonnade. “There’s quite a few.”
“The beautiful one with the Latina woman.”
Francis knew immediately to whom Silva was referring. An elegant woman, courtly in the European tradition, stood silhouetted by the light two columns away. “The blonde?”
“Yes, and the dark-haired woman is Ilma. She’s from South America. She’s stopped by the table, given a donation, and picked up our literature. Her friend’s been with her at least two or three times, but she never comes over.”
“I think she’s gathered her courage,” Francis said, standing back as the two women approached.
The graceful female silently surveyed the photographs on Silva’s table. She raised her brown eyes to meet Silva’s gray, and Francis had an uncanny sense of some kind of special communication passing between the two Europeans.
“You already know about Best Friends, don’t you?” Silva asked.
The woman nodded. “Ilma gave me your material.”
Francis detected an accent but couldn’t quite place it.
“I have been hesitant to come over,” the woman continued. “I am helpless for animals.” Her shrug was more eloquent than words. “Ilma tells me you ask for names and telephones, but we haven’t felt comfortable before.” Again the slight lifting of her shoulders. Silva nodded understanding. “Ilma also informs me you have put out a bulletin to help adopt animals in Los Angeles. My name is Maria Petersen, if you need any assistance.” She slipped a gold-lettered card into Silva’s hand.
Petersen. Petersen. Francis repeated the name in his mind. One of his favorite movies, Das Boot, had been directed by Wolfgang Petersen, a German filmmaker. No, that would be too much of a coincidence, even in L.A.
“We will meet again,” Maria Petersen said to Silva as she slid a check into the jar. “You have been here all day, have you not?” Maria turned to Francis. “You should take her home. She needs to rest.”
“I just met a sister,” Silva said, watching the sophisticated European walk away.
Francis was thoughtful. “I think she felt the same way. Now I’ll get the car. You pack up. We’ve got a long drive to the canyon tomorrow. Come on, Goldilocks. You come with me.”
Silva smiled. “Home. It will be nice to go home for a bit.”
Outside a Whole Foods supermarket in Los Gatos, California, Anne Mejia watched a huge rig grind into the far end of the parking lot. A burly trucker with glowering eyes and legs like tree trunks climbed from his cab and strode toward the entrance of the store. He looks like the price of gas just went up again.
“Now there’s a man with a heart,” she called cheerily as the big man approached her table.
The trucker scowled. “I ain’t got no heart, lady, so lay off.”
Anne Mejia jumped up and impulsively put her small hand on his chest. “Oh, of course, you do. I can feel it.” A curious knot of shoppers paused to watch the action. “He does too have a heart,” she informed everybody.
Spontaneous smiles passed around the group. Someone started clapping, and the rest of the crowd joined in. The trucker couldn’t make up his mind whether to be embarrassed or angry. Good nature won out. He shook his head and pointed at Anne’s display. “You have no idea how much I miss my dog,” he shared with the men and women who had surrounded him. “It gets real lonely on the road.”
His explanation was met with clucks of sympathy.
“You sho
uld bring your pet with you,” a woman advised.
“Do you carry a picture?” another asked.
The trucker immediately pulled a wallet from his jacket and proudly showed a dog-eared photograph of a happily panting retriever with a bandana around its neck. Then he extracted a ten-dollar bill and handed it to Anne. “You’re all right,” he said and strolled on into the health food supermarket chuckling.
Others in the crowd followed suit. “Thank you. Thank you so much from the animals. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Thank you.” Anne Mejia beamed as each bill was pushed into her donation can.
What nice people, she thought, as she seated herself behind her table once again.
Maia Astor wasn’t having the same good day. She had conceived the idea of putting donation cans inside supermarkets, her first attempts being at the giant Smith’s grocery chain with its forty stores in the greater Los Angeles area.
She had navigated the maze of paperwork and permissions needed for her operation through Smith’s Anaheim office, and everything was going rather nicely, she thought. Maybe it was the adorable picture of the puppy that adorned the can. She didn’t really know. All Maia saw was that people responded. Sometimes she collected $500 in a week.
Maia didn’t know Los Angeles. Downtown, Watts, South Central were just neighborhoods to her. She would admit they looked a little more rundown than West Hollywood, and the people not as benevolent. But management had assured her she could place cans in every twenty-four-hour store in every neighborhood—and she did.
It was 1:30 A.M. when she stopped for gas after the last pickup in South Central. She stuck the nozzle of regular into the tank and leaned against the pump, trying to figure how much she might have collected by the weight of the cans. Maia was aware of shouting in the convenience mart behind her, but she was keeping too close an eye on the scrolling dollars to pay much attention.
She shut off the gas nine cents shy of her ten-dollar limit. Carefully, she extracted the correct bill from her purse and trudged wearily into the brightly lit market.
“You ain’t getting no cigarettes unless I see the color of money.” The bull-necked white man behind the counter defied the T-shirted African-American wrestler. At least he looked like a wrestler to Maia with his bulging biceps and shaved head.
The black man reached over and with one huge hand grabbed his antagonist around his thick throat. “You don’t mess with me, m . . .”
Maia shut her ears to the profanity.
The men didn’t seem to notice her. They snarled obscenities in each other’s faces while Maia shrank back against the candy display. She thought of surreptitiously easing out of the store the same way she had come in—quietly. Somehow that didn’t seem right. She had to pay for what she had taken. “Excuse me.”
It was as if she were a ghost. The giant black man briefly raked her with stony eyes and turned back to his sullen adversary.
But it wasn’t all going his way. In that split second the night manager reached under the counter, grabbed a rifle, and stuck it in his opponent’s gut. The wrestler slowly released his grip.
“Not so bold now, are we?” The shotgun muzzle moved slowly over the muscled chest. Now it was the black man’s turn to feel uneasy.
Maia thought the situation was getting quite out of hand. She coughed and stepped forward. “Nine ninety-one of regular,” she murmured, pushing Alexander Hamilton’s likeness toward the manager.
The two men froze. Maia didn’t think it polite to repeat herself, but she really had no choice. “Ten dollars of regular at pump three, with nine cents change,” she apologized.
The wrestler leaned cautiously away from the gun barrel, backed up three steps, turned, and ran out of the store. The night manager stared at Maia in disbelief. “Nine cents change, thank you,” she repeated shyly.
Francis was beside himself when Maia told the story over Thanksgiving dinner. Only that past September the young woman had been tabling outside a K-Mart in Yuma, Arizona.
As fate would have it that sweltering 105-degree afternoon, a robbery was in progress inside the store. Outside, an uncomfortable Maia, with only five dollars to show for the day, figured it was a lost cause, dismantled her table, and returned to her car.
She turned the ignition. Nothing. She pumped the gas pedal. Nada. Maia sat sweating in the suffocating heat. Suddenly a skinny Hispanic kid sprinted across the parking lot toward the old jalopy parked in the adjoining space. Maia leaped out of her car. “Can you give me a jump start?” she asked in all innocence.
The teenager glanced back at K-Mart, but no one was following. “Okay, let’s do it quick then.”
Five Arizona Highway Patrol cars screamed across the tarmac as a grateful Maia waved good-bye to the hapless robber. “Muchas gracias, amigo.”
“That’s it,” Francis declared. “I don’t care how much we need the money. You’re not tabling anymore, Maia. I think something’s trying to tell you to stay here and help Judah with the cats.”
“I’d like that,” Maia said.
Everyone else, however, was reporting some success. Anne Mejia and Jana de Peyer, with the help of Rocky Raccoon the puppet, seemed destined to be stars. They regularly phoned in $300 a day to their ecstatic treasurer. Yes, tabling was hard, grueling work, but the bills were getting paid.
Still John repeated the mantra as if counting worry beads. “It’s not enough. It’s not enough.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Another Straw on the Camel’s Back
The January blues dragged into February, with the monies from tabling falling off along with shoppers’ Christmas generosity. John Christopher Fripp looked more grim every day at lunch at The Village. Lunch had become their daily time for discussion, and the communal ritual seemed to lift their collective spirits somewhat—except for John’s. There was no sparkle in the sailor blue eyes these days. In spite of the fact that their situation was improving, the treasurer knew only too well by how thin a margin they held on. Even Faith couldn’t cheer away his worry lines.
“I got another twenty-five-dollar check from Dolores and Homer Harris,” she announced brightly. John slurped his last spoonful of soup without comment. “As soon as it gets warmer, Homer said he’s coming to visit. He says the San Diego sunshine’s spoiled his bones for anything less than seventy degrees. I can’t wait to meet him. I wonder why Dolores isn’t coming.”
With all their troubles, Best Friends still responded to an animal in need. The year before, Diana had taken a cat from a local man, Jim Travers, who had found it in a ditch. A month later Faith received a check for twenty-five dollars from Dolores Harris with a brief note. “Use this for the animals.”
Faith had no idea who Dolores Harris was. It was only later she discovered that Jim Travers and Dolores and Homer Harris were old friends. All Faith knew when she received the check was that she had never, ever gotten money in the mail from anyone before. She wrote an exuberant two pages back to the surprise benefactor. Dolores took to mailing a donation from time to time, and the two women struck up a long-distance friendship.
“That’s wonderful, Faith,” John said. “I’m afraid I’m thinking about my meeting with Zions Bank next month. If they won’t renegotiate our balloon nothing will help.”
A sudden pall fell around the table. For the most part, they tried not to think about the $400,000 payment that was due on the canyon in less than six months. Their foundation’s treasurer lived with the sword over his head every waking hour.
“Well, I had an idea,” Jana said brightly. “I’m putting together a photo album of our unadoptables, you know, like Timmie, Tomato, and Maddie, and taking it tabling with me. We’ve all had people saying they wished they could have an animal, but they live in an apartment or something; maybe they could be a surrogate owner, like a sort of guardian angel.”
Her suggestion was greeted with all the enthusiasm of an execution.
“Thanks, guys, I thought it might generate some extra money.”
&nb
sp; “Ssshh, I’m thinking,” Charity announced, as if a brilliant revelation were about to unfold. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve got members who’d love something like that.”
“I need to check with Dr. Christy what his vet bill might be. He’s coming today, isn’t he?”
“He should have been here already,” Faith frowned.
“Anyway, if—” Jana paused as the familiar flap of rubber overboots signalled the arrival of the veterinarian. Everyone’s smiles of greeting faded at his appearance. His eyes were red-veined and puffy, his skin the color of parchment. Bill Christy collapsed exhausted into the nearest chair.
“You don’t look too well,” Charity said, getting up from the table. “A nice bowl of hot soup will do you good.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.” The vet’s voice was scratched and labored. “I’ve got laryngitis. I don’t think I can swallow.” He shook his head at the steaming broth Charity placed before him.
“You shouldn’t be out,” Faith exclaimed coming to his side.
“I promised Judah I’d test some cats for feline leukemia,” Dr. Christy rasped.
“That can wait. They’re perfectly safe in quarantine. I’m sending you home right now,” Mama Faith ordered.
Bill Christy sighed. “I have appointments through tonight.”
Faith cupped his elbow. “You don’t need to be out in this cold. You need to get to bed.”
The veterinarian didn’t resist as she walked him out of the meeting room. “Maybe I will,” he said. “I will.”
Faith was exhausted herself by day’s end and had gone to bed early. The call came around 9:00 P.M., and for a moment a sleep-dazed Faith imagined that she was back in animal control.
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