He’d definitely have picked up that call.
Oh well. He didn’t have time to date anybody, anyway. And he’d never yet found a woman who could be understanding about the erratic demands of his work. No reason to think the little hottie from yesterday would be any different.
Speaking of work, he had a full day of it. Sundays were always extra busy at the shelter. He set his phone back on the nightstand, got up, straightened out his bed, and headed to the kitchen for some coffee.
*****
“Hex, you got a sec?”
At the question and the corresponding knock on his office door frame, Hex looked up and smiled at Callie. He’d been at work less than half an hour, so the day hadn’t gone to hell yet. He had a sec. “What’s up?”
“I sent you the totals from yesterday’s sale. Did you check your email yet?”
He hadn’t. His work email was a snarled mess. On any given day he got a couple hundred new messages, ranging from highly important notices from the state of California and the city of Sacramento, queries and offers from businesses around the region, desperate pleas from people in need, and about twice as many of all that in plain ol’ spam. He tried to keep it all sorted into folders, but that was like shoving the mess under a rug. He checked it once a day, when he could get up the will to face the deluge and sort out the important stuff. And he gave his cell number out readily so people who really needed him could get him in a way he’d be sure to see it quickly.
“Nope. Not enough coffee yet.”
Callie laughed and came into his office. “You need another assistant. Or, you know, if we had a social media person, they could manage the shelter email as part of their work.”
She’d been nagging at him for months to hire somebody to handle their web page and social media. Hex didn’t think that was a bad idea, but the money just wasn’t there. They were loosely affiliated with the Catholic Church and got some support there and from the state as well, and they had some corporate donations, but most of their budget came from private donations and things like the rummage sale. They were not exactly rolling in dough.
Creating a whole new staff position was not in the budget—their existing paid staff positions were barely in the budget—and he couldn’t trust, or burden, a volunteer with that kind of work. He handled the social media himself, and did the best he could.
Which was not very good.
In response to Callie’s prod, Hex sighed.
Callie grinned. “I’m just sayin’.”
“I know. And I’m just sayin’, we can’t afford it. Unless we did miraculously well yesterday. What’s the total?”
“Not miraculous, but not bad. Five thousand, seven hundred and three dollars and fourteen cents.”
That was seven hundred and three dollars better than they’d projected. But, “Fourteen cents?”
“Toward the end of the day we sold that bag of swag button pins—you know, the ones that said ‘Tree City USA’?—for a penny a pop. Cleared them out.”
“Nice. Good. That money needs to get logged and deposited straight into the food bank account. Byron and I will resupply tomorrow.”
“Already logged and deposited, boss. I do know my job, you know.”
With a chuckle, Hex conceded the point. “Sorry. I know you do. How’d last night go?”
They’d had a rainstorm last night. Fairly unusual for April in Northern California. By now, they were usually starting the long dry slog to wildfire season, but this spring had continued as wet as the winter.
Bad weather always meant a capacity crowd at the shelter. For the most part, California was relatively hospitable for rough-living people, but that meant when bad weather did hit, fewer were prepared for it, and shelters got slammed.
“The usual for rain. Beds full and we brought out the bedrolls, put about twenty more in the dining hall for the night.”
“Byron already gave me that info. Did we have any trouble?”
Callie smirked. “Big Dan didn’t show. I heard he got a spot at SafeZone. He’s their problem now.”
SafeZone was a tent city near Cal Expo. They had a waiting list for spots and a fairly rigorous list of rules for their residents, so Big Dan was probably not long for that spot, if he in fact had somehow cleared their screening. An Iraq War vet with severe PTSD and paranoid schizophrenia, who was about six-five and well over three hundred pounds, he was notorious among the city shelters and kitchens for being hard to manage.
Hex himself had a scar on the back of his head from an altercation with Big Dan during one of his episodes—an altercation that had landed Hex in the hospital for three days. If he ever went bald, that scar would be a significant feature.
Big Dan was one of those cases every social worker seemed to have, a story queued up to share at conferences. He was a good guy with a broken brain. When he was medicated, he was gentle and shy. The kind of man who’d go out of his way to step around a beetle on the sidewalk. He always said please and thank you, he called women ‘ma’am’ and men ‘sir,’ he obeyed all the rules, was grateful for any help or kindness. He took care of the people around him, too.
But when he was off his meds, he was Godzilla, raging and destructive, truly dangerous, seeing enemies everywhere and prepared to fight them to the death.
When you were homeless, it wasn’t so easy to stay on your meds. Even for those who were on Medicaid and Medi-Cal and could get it without cost, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of obstacles standing between them and the clinic to get to their appointments and prescriptions.
Big Dan wanted to be the calm, good man whose demons stayed quiet. But he couldn’t always manage it.
Hex had grown up in homeless shelters with his mentally ill mother. She’d died because she couldn’t get to her meds, and the meds she could get to were the kind that killed people like her eventually—either through overdose, or, like his mother, through the things she’d had to do to get them.
Sometimes, like his mother, they left fifteen-year-old boys behind to fend for themselves. And that never turned out well.
It drove him fucking nuts that he couldn’t save Big Dan.
His staff, on the other hand, breathed a great gust of relief every day that big shaggy dude in a tattered desert camo Army jacket did not fill up their doorway. Hex couldn’t blame them. He wasn’t the only one who’d bled for getting too close to the guy on a bad day.
“We got a new family last night. Mom and three kids. They came in late, had to bed down in the dining hall. Mom’s pretty bashed up, kids are pretty freaked. She hasn’t talked more than she had to to get safe yet. You want to talk to her?”
“They’re still here?”
“Yeah. Bonnie got them beds in the women and children dorm for tonight. I’m working on finding a longer-term placement, but I can’t get her to talk.”
St. Benedict’s operation had three arms: a food bank, a soup kitchen (they called it simply the dining hall), and a night-by-night shelter. While they did have regulars, every night was a first-come, first-served situation. No bed was reserved. And honestly, though they insisted on good conduct from their clients, a transient shelter like St. Ben’s was no place for children to stay more than a night or two.