Free One Good Dog by Susan Wilson

goes down the three wide steps, pausing for a moment to take Adam in, then meanders down the street, kicking aside an empty plastic bag, muttering in an angry grumble punctuated with a single comprehensible word. Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. Adam slides a moist hand down his tie, shrugs his perfectly tailored jacket into place, and jogs up the steps.
    If he expects to be greeted as a visiting dignitary, Adam is mistaken. It takes a few minutes to find the man in charge and he is forced to speak to the indigents hanging around the narrow hallway, who point him to the director’s office.
    Adam knocks at the open door to a room that might once have been a large room but is now split into two smaller ones. A man Adam presumes to be the director is sitting at a desk, facing the open door. His feet, in the largest shoes Adam thinks he has ever seen, are on the desk, which is piled with manila folders. He’s on the phone, the curling cord twisted into a contortion of wire. Seeing Adam there, he waves him in with a wide gesture, mouthing “big donor” and pointing to the phone.
    Adam is impatient, not appreciating having to wait to introduce himself and get this over with. The director smiles over the mouthpiece, a helpless “What can you do?” smile.
    Rocking slightly on his heels, his hands jammed into trouser pockets, Adam examines the various newspaper-reprint photographs on the wall. Each one pictures the director shaking hands with a familiar politician: Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Mayor Menino, Bill Weld. Deval Patrick. Each one is a study in two smiling faces, below which, hands are locked in a stagy clasp across bodies.
    At last, the director drops the phone into the cradle, further tangling its overstretched cord. “Sorry about that. Potential donor. Gotta listen to their ideas.”
    “Adam March. I’m here to, uh, volunteer.” The word
volunteer
sticks a little in his throat, as if he isn’t able to recall the proper verb; he’s been thinking of this as a sentence.
    “Robert Carmondy.” Carmondy is a big man. He knows this and puts it to good use. “They call me ‘Big Bob.’” He reaches over the breadth of the desk and cheerfully squeezes the life out of Adam’s hand. Whack. A manly Big Bob shoulder slap nearly takes Adam off his feet. “Glad to have you here. Siddown.”
    Big Bob’s office is a tiny space filled mostly with a desk, a file cabinet too full to close the drawers all the way, and Big Bob. Adam turns to the only other chair in the room, the seat of which is filled with even more unfiled folders. Bob makes no move to accommodate his well-dressed visitor, so Adam lifts an armload of folders and sits down; finding no surface available to place the folders, he ends up holding them in his lap. Bob looks at him with a slight smile, and Adam wonders if he’s going to be asked to start filing.
    “Let me tell you about this place.” With that, Big Bob is off on his well-rehearsed narrative on the genesis of the Fort Street Center: the evolution from a crack house to a safe house; his own brush with homelessness, getting off the drugs himself; and the constant need for money.
    Adam smiles. This is where he can be of service. “I have some ideas.”
    Bob cuts him off with a teacher’s gesture. “We follow a strict protocol of confidentiality. We don’t know what happened to these guys; we don’t rehab, counsel, or criticize. We just feed ’em; wash ’em, if they’ll have it; bunk ’em, if theywant; and street ’em. They don’t live here. They can come and stay, but this is a way station. Capice?”
    “I do.”
    “Okay, then.” Big Bob rocks back against his chair, which protests like a wounded animal.
    “What do you need to know about me?”
    “Nothing. You’re here and you’ll do what I need you to do.”
    “I have some ideas.” Maybe Big Bob hasn’t heard him the first time. “I’ve been looking into some grants—”
    Big Bob snaps forward, the back of his chair crying out in