Free On the Nickel by John Shannon

us.’
    ‘I don’t know Hollywood, hon. I was never on the job there. San Pedro I could tell you three places off the top of my head. Harbor City … Wilmington. OK, how ’bout this. I heard Catholic Liberation opened a women’s shelter downtown last year. I think it’s on Third or Fourth a little west of Alameda.’
    ‘Do the women have to be Catholic?’
    ‘No way. Nobody does that stuff.’
    ‘That’s a pretty rough area, isn’t it?’
    ‘Where are you calling from?’
    ‘OK, I get it, Mom.’ The ‘mom’ was as gently ironic as she could make it.
    ‘They’ll be in good hands with Liberation, believe me. Those women are so clean and good they frown if you make a joke.’
    ‘Thanks a bunch, Glor.’ She cut off before Gloria could get in another snide dig about picking up strays.
    ‘We got a place to stay,’ Maeve announced. She realized she should probably call ahead, but she had an inkling they might be much better off this late at night just showing up and throwing themselves on the mercy of the nuns, or whoever ran the place.
    ‘Thank you,’ Felice said gravely. ‘I wish I could give you something.’ The little girl looked very guarded, as she had all evening.
    ‘That’s OK. Let’s get your stuff.’
    ‘We’ll go fetch it and meet you right back here,’ the woman said.
    Maeve realized immediately that the woman didn’t want her to see where they were staying, but it could have meant a long walk with their possessions. ‘I have a car around the corner. Look, I promise I won’t watch where you go. I’ll wait anywhere you say and you can go out of sight.’
    Millie squeezed her mother’s arm with some message Maeve couldn’t read.
    ‘Your daughter’s tired,’ Maeve said.
    ‘Why you be so nice to us?’ the woman asked. ‘We ain’t had nothing but busted luck since we got to this awful city. People so mean here, the eating places they soak they throwouts in bleach so can’t nobody eat it outta the dumpster.’
    ‘Aw, I didn’t know that. That’s terrible. My parents taught me to be nice to folks. Don’t you think people should help other people?’
    Maeve thought she could just see tears in the woman’s eyes. The little girl, who’d obviously had her share of busted luck too, remained hard and suspicious.
    ‘Some day, when you’re back on your feet, you’ll remember this and help somebody else. That’s the way it comes around. OK?’
    The woman nodded, and the little girl thrust out the doll toward Maeve. ‘Here.’
    ‘Will you let me hold her, just for a minute or two?’ Maeve said.
    Millie nodded grimly.
    That evening, Conor had started getting used to his utterly plain room at the Fortnum. Austerity normalized, like everything else. It was a strange thing, he thought, but any resting place that didn’t devour you or call down the dogs of hell, you pretty quickly come to feel safe, even a bit homey. His only problem really was the squashed roaches on the walls, almost like a wallpaper pattern. Before him, somebody had had a contest with himself to see how many he could crush every night, and nobody had ever cleaned up. It was hard to imagine a hotel that didn’t even scrape off the dead roaches between guests, but some things were getting easier to imagine every day.
    All Conor’s life, his father had written about the poor, the working poor in America and the dirt poor in Mexico, and he really admired his father for doing that, but he realized how abstract it had all remained for him. It hadn’t really penetrated his personal reality out in suburbia, not in any meaningful way. He remembered the joke he’d heard at school about the kid at Beverly Hills High who’d written an essay about poverty. Everybody was poor, the maid was poor, the cook was poor, the butler was poor …
    He went out at night, braving the busy murmuring darkness all around, along Sixth Street and then San Julian, to Mike’s Market two blocks away and bought a sponge and some 409. He