Free On the Nickel by John Shannon Page A

retraced his course and started wiping off the insect remains and depositing them in the plastic bag he’d been given for his purchases. Thrift, he thought. Never in his life had the reuse of a plastic bag meant anything at all to him. I’m learning a few new things here. I’m learning how other people have to live. He tried to think of rhyming lines for a song about extreme forms of thrift, but nothing would come. Bag. Tin can. Need-feed. Plastic.
    Even the roaches were poor, he thought.
    They were very careful to make her park around the corner at Cherokee Avenue, but Maeve could see the dark alley toward which Felice and Millie walked hand-in-hand. Aw, no, she thought, when they confirmed her suspicion by turning abruptly down the alley. They’d actually been living in a cardboard box, or under a hedge, living rough. It was inconceivable, though she had certainly tried to conceive it. No wonder they’d seemed so unwashed. She glanced down at the naked doll beside her, left in her temporary custody and nearly wept.
    ‘Sorry, dollie. I’ll get you some clothes. I promise. And your owner. My little sister.’
    They came back with a dilapidated pair of those red plaid hard-board suitcases from Kress or Newberrys that you never saw any more. She’d had a tiny one herself as a child, for weekends with her dad, before her mom had replaced it with a Gore-tex wheelie from some catalogue.
    ‘Your dollie was almost crying, she missed you so much,’ Maeve said.
    The little girl glanced at Maeve as if she were nuts, then sat in the back seat and withdrew into herself.
    ‘It’s not far,’ Maeve said reassuringly, though she was a bit nervous herself about driving into Skid Row after dark.
    She headed back along Sunset Boulevard, past gentrifying Silverlake and Echo Park, and just as she approached the cheery overlit and counterfeit Mexican tourist trap of Olvera Street, she headed south into Downtown on Main. She motored slowly east along Third Street through a stretch of abandoned buildings that grew darker and more forbidding. No center to be seen. She came back along Fourth, hoping Gloria hadn’t got it wrong.
    But eventually the shelter stood out like a radiant island on the street, with even a bit of lawn protected by a high wire fence. She stopped right in front.
    ‘You guys wait.’
    Maeve plucked up her courage and walked to the gate and called to a large black woman who was sitting on a beach chair on the lawn, smoking. ‘Ma’am. I have a mother and child who need a shelter bad.’
    ‘We full up.’
    ‘Please.’
    ‘Wait there, girl.’ The black woman frugally scraped the burning tip off her cigarette, tucked it into the grass beside the leg of her chair, and went inside.
    Eventually a thin woman with graying red hair came out into the puddle of brighter light by the door. She looked vaguely familiar to Maeve.
    ‘Hello, there, I’m Sister Mary Rose.’
    It was the voice that did it, and the nervous energy that the woman gave off. Omigod! Maeve thought. But she betrayed no sign, because the woman obviously didn’t recognize her. After all, she was almost ten years older now and Maeve’s jump from nine to eighteen was much bigger than this woman’s forty-five to fifty-four.
    ‘I have a mother and young girl in the car who really need shelter.’
    The woman sucked her teeth an instant. ‘We’re always full by this time.’
    ‘They need a place really really bad, ma’am.’
    ‘Don’t get in a tizz. We’ll set up cots or something until we have room.’ She used a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked the gate. ‘Bring them in. Let’s see what we can do.’
    The woman hurried away into the building. Eleanor Ong was her name – whatever her nun name had been before and probably was again, Maeve thought. Her father had been madly in love with her then – yes, it was almost ten years ago, not too long after he’d left her own mother. Eleanor had already quit some convent, but apparently