Free More Than Words: Stories of Hope by Diana Palmer, Catherine Mann, Kasey Michaels

restaurants and delivering it to people in shelters. I must admit, it didn’t seem possible.”
    Mary smiled. “You mean, because we were in such bad shape ourselves?”
    “Yes.”
    “I never learned how kind people could be until I hit rock bottom,” Mary explained patiently. “Or how much poverty and need there is out there, on the streets. There are disabled people, handicapped people, paraplegics and diabetics andpeople dying of cancer who have nothing.” Mary took a long breath. “You know, handing out a little good food might not seem like much to do for people in those situations. But it gives them hope. It shows them that they’re important, that they’re valuable to someone. It helps them to see that everyone doesn’t turn away and avoid looking at them.”
    “I know what you mean,” the woman said quietly as she got to her feet. “I’ll make those calls. Have you got a way to pick up the food? What am I saying? You must have, or you wouldn’t be adding restaurants to your list.”
    “The shelter where I started out was given a pickup truck. We use that.”
    “We?”
    “I have a few volunteers who help me,” Mary said. “And my children, of course.”
    “How do you manage to do that and keep your children in school?”
    “Oh, not just in school,” Mary assured her. “One of them plays football and one is in band. I think it’s important for them to learn teamwork.”
    The other woman smiled. “Smart. I’ve always said that baseball kept my younger brothers out of jail. One of them plays for the Mets,” she added, “and the other two are assistant managers on different ball teams.”
    “You must be proud of them,” Mary commented.
    “Yes, I am. I helped keep them out of trouble. Could you use another volunteer? I don’t just have sports cars in the garage. I’ve got that huge SUV out back. It will hold a heck of a lot of food.”
    “You mean it?”
    “I’m bored to death, alone with my fancy house and my fast cars and my money,” Billie said blandly. “I don’t have any kids and my husband is working himself to death trying to enlarge a company that’s already too big. If I don’t find some sort of useful purpose, I’ll sit here alone long enough to become an alcoholic. I saw my Dad go out that way. I’m not going to.”
    Mary grinned, feeling a kinship with the woman for the first time. “We all meet at the Twelfth Street shelter about five in the afternoon.”
    “Then I’ll see you at five at the shelter,” Billie said, smiling back.
    “Thanks,” Mary said huskily.
    “We all live on the same planet. I guess that makes us family, despite the ticky little details that separate us.”
    “I’m beginning to feel the same way.”
    The two women shared a smile before Mary got back to work. It was so incredible, she thought, how you could work for somebody and not know anything about them at all. So often, people seemed as obvious as editorial cartoons. Then you got to know them, and they were really complex novels with endless plot twists.
     
    Not only did Billie show up with her SUV at the shelter, but one of Matt’s colleagues from the police force, a tall, young man named Chad, drove up in another SUV and offered to help the group transport the food.
    It was getting complicated, because there were now so many restaurants contributing to the program. Mary had been jotting down everything in a small notebook, so that she could refer back to it, but the notebook was filling up fast.
    “We’ve got a small laptop computer with a printer that was donated last week,” Bev mentioned. “We really should get all this information into the computer, so that you can keep up with pickup and delivery locations and the time frames.”
    Mary agreed. “That would be nice. But I don’t know how to use a computer,” she added with a grimace. “We were never able to afford one.”
    “I work with them all the time,” Matt said with a lazy smile. “Suppose I come over an hour