Free Until Spring by Pamela Browning Page B

opening.
    Jane felt abandoned, exhausted, worried and confused. She was subject to incapacitating headaches that did not abate even with the strong pain medicine that Dr. Bergstrom had prescribed.
    For two weeks Jane lived at the shelter and helped the other women care for their children when she could. The women were grateful but wary for reasons of their own. Jane made no friends.
    When Jane went to the social services office for her first appointment with Miss Bird, who was supposed to help her find a job, she was curtly informed that the woman had been fired.
    "Is there another social worker I should see?" Jane asked anxiously as she stood at the counter.
    A harried clerk looked up from her filing.
    "What?"
    "Have I been assigned to another social worker?"
    "I'll look it up in a minute," the woman said with a sigh.
    After a short time, the clerk disappeared into a back room for fifteen minutes. When she came back, she stared at Jane as though she'd never seen her before.
    "Can I help you?"
    "I was waiting to see if I was assigned to another social worker," Jane reminded her.
    "Oh, sure." The woman leafed through a pile of folders. "You're supposed to talk to Mrs. Engel, but she's got appointments scheduled all afternoon. You'll have to come back tomorrow."
    Jane did return the next day and was informed that Mrs. Engel was out sick. And that day she was asked to leave the women's shelter. She hadn't seen it coming, and she was feeling very stressed when called to the office.
    "It's not that we want you to leave," the administrator told her apologetically. "It's just that we need your room for a woman with two children. Her safety could be jeopardized if she doesn't get out of her home where she's threatened by an abusive husband. Surely you understand."
    "Of course," Jane said. With tears streaming down her face, she quietly packed her suitcase.
    When she left, she had no idea where to go. She headed for the local McDonald's and sat there for four hours nursing a blinding headache and trying to summon up the nerve to ask for a job. When she did, the manager told her that he was sorry, but he had no openings. She was terrified when she walked out. Where was she to go? What was she to do?
    Thus ensued several days and nights when Jane, her head pounding, wandered the street by day and slept in a twenty-four-hour laundromat by night. Finally the night manager at the laundromat told her that she wasn't welcome anymore. She would have to find somewhere else to sleep.
    But where? She had no money, and she had no car. She had no identification. She didn't even have a name.
    She forced herself to think optimistically and managed to land a job in a small restaurant called the Buttercup Café, slinging hamburgers behind the counter. An advance on her salary made it possible for her to rent a room in a run-down house. At least it was a place to sleep, and she fixed up the room with items that she'd found where they'd been left out for trash pick-up. After she hung a few pictures on the wall and placed artificial flowers in vases on the dresser, the room was almost homey. Her spirits lifted considerably.
    Then, perhaps because of the poor nutrition, she caught a particularly bad cold and lost her job when she couldn't work for a week. And when she didn't have enough money to pay her rent, she was politely asked to leave the boarding house.
    At her wits' end, she used the landlady's phone to call Mrs. Engel, the new social worker, and asked for an appointment.
    "I can't see you until Monday," Mrs. Engel told her.
    "But I'm really desperate." By this time, Jane was talking in a monotone. She had no energy to put into her voice. Her head had been aching steadily for several days, and the pain showed no sign of going away.
    "I'm so sorry, but I have a full schedule. What time can you come on Monday?"
    "I need help now," Jane said, her spirits sinking even further. This was Thursday. Monday was four days away. How would she survive until