Free A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless by Danielle Steel Page B

no one to help her. And then one day, when we came back to find her, her crib was gone—“crib” being an appropriate word in her case. The cardboard was folded and lying on the street. I could only assume that the baby had come, and I had no idea where she was. I never saw her again, and have no notion of where she isnow. The saddest thing, in all of these cases, particularly with older people you see on the streets, is that when they vanish, you have no idea if their condition is better or worse. You have no idea if they’ve gone inside, moved away, are sick somewhere, or have died. All of these people who have carved their faces into my heart and memory may no longer be alive. And yet they live on in my head. Brenda, Jerry … “How do I look?” … the young pregnant mother … the girl in the wheelchair with one leg who once wore pearls … They are embedded in my soul and my memories.
    Another man who made a deep impression lined up behind our vans when we pulled up at the public library. We had to be careful in that location, because sometimes there were large numbers of people, as many as forty or fifty. It was also a short distance from Market Street, where we knew drug deals went down. Once people heard that we’d arrived, once they knew about us, they’d flock to us in droves. And if we ran out of supplies, we could be in real danger and deep trouble. Aside from that, I hated disappointing anyone out there; that’s not why we were there. But we also had to consider the risks. And running out of supplies among desperate people, particularly if there were drugs involved, could have been very dangerous for us. So we were careful where we stopped, and how many people were around, and that we had enough supplies on hand.
    But on that particular night, it seemed quiet at the library. There were about thirty people lined up behind the van. There was a homeless young skateboarder doing flips and tricks on the library steps, and he came back and forth to chat with us, as others stood waiting peacefully. It was all men that night. And I noticed a man far back in the line, in a business suit, white shirt, and tie, and immediately frowned disapproval. I was afraid he was just there to get something free, and he wasn’t homeless. I said something to one of my co-workers, asking what he was doing in the line, and my colleague said that he was okay, he had seen him come out of a sleeping bag on the library steps.
    Every now and then, as we worked in less ravaged neighborhoods, people would approach with curiosity. When they saw what we were doing, they sometimes said something kind to us. And only a handful over all those years tried to take advantage of an opportunity for something free, although they weren’t homeless. I suspected the man in the suit of that. The information that he’d been sleeping on the library steps reassured me, but we had never come across anyone like him on the streets. Some of the people we dealt with were still surprisingly clean, like a few young men who were homeless but trying to get jobs, who kept their hair combed and their faces well shaven, and wore clean running shoes for a while(they get dirty quickly). But no one had ever shown up in a suit and tie. I was more than startled.
    I hung around the back of the van to get a better look at him as he approached, and finally he was next in line for our supplies. He met my eyes, and I smiled at him. No way was I going to say “What are
you
doing here?” but he volunteered his own story, which was extremely rare on the streets. What shocked me most was not only was he wearing a good-looking dark-gray striped business suit, a clean white shirt, and a sober tie he had loosened, but his shoes were polished. He wore rimless glasses and had a good haircut. I guessed him to be in his late fifties. He looked like my banker, anyone’s stockbroker, or some of my friends. I would never in a hundred million years have guessed that he was