“April probably wants to keep her mother from interfering in her personal life.” My dad spoke up for the first time since my mother arrived.
April nodded vigorously.
“Now how about we all just have a nice dinner and forget all about matchmaking, Jeannie? After all, it’s our only daughter’s birthday, that’s something to celebrate.”
“Thanks Dad.”
I sent him a grateful look, but my mother was not happy about this turn of events.
“I’m done messing around, young lady,” she said firmly, pointing at me in emphasis. “I want you married and I want a damned grandchild before I’m too old to hold them, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
Julia
Present day…
“Hey boss, did Mary and the kids move out?”
I looked up as my lead case manager Robbie, stuck her head in my office.
“Yeah, the team drove her and the kids over to meet the landlord and pick up the keys. They’re all so excited. She said she doesn’t care if her new furniture isn’t coming until tomorrow, she was going to spend her first night in their own home camping out in the living room.”
Robbie and I shared a smile. Mary and her family had been participating in our homeless families program for nearly two years now. When we first met her she was living in a shelter fordomestic violence survivors after narrowly escaping a man who was trying to kill her in retaliation for filing for divorce. Her abuser had gone to prison and her DV advocate referred her to our program. It had been a long, hard road but Mary was finally in a better place, about to start her new life.
The Sunrise program provided transitional housing and shelter for women with children who were leaving homelessness. Given that domestic violence was the number one cause of homelessness for women, we also worked with a lot of survivors. Our wraparound services helped women like Mary move to self-sufficiency by connecting them with what they needed, such as counseling, family therapy, job training, financial literacy, and parenting classes.
We were proud of our program. Once our clients were employed and moved into housing of their own, our outcomes were some of the best in the country. We were literally helping people change their lives every day, and while our work was hard and often traumatic, I loved it.
We all did.
“Is Gina coming to our meeting today?” Robbie asked.
Gina was the program manager for Sunrise. She usually worked in the main admin building but frequently joined our team meetings to hear how things were going and offer support to the team.
“No, she’s been helping with a special project in admin, but I’m going to the main office later to meet with her.”
Robbie was a good friend whom I’d worked with at my last job, but we needed to maintain boundaries here since we were no longer peers. My team lead wasn’t in management so I couldn’t share that the special project involved Gina compiling evidence in a criminal case.
A recent state audit of our program had uncovered financial discrepancies – discrepancies that led right to our long-time CFO Erin Rose. Most of the staff knew that Erin had left the agency, but not that she’d left in handcuffs after being indicted for embezzling from our programs. After the arrest, the executive director and our board had brought in forensic auditors who, assisted by the state, had uncovered the breadth of the embezzlement. Now we were putting in new internal controls to keep it from happening again.
Fortunately it looked like the state was not going to cut our funding over the incident, because if they did, our program would close and all of our families would be back on the street. And we’d all be out of a job too.
The alarm on my phone beeped, reminding me it was time to head to the meeting. I used alarms for everything to keep me from getting focused on something else and forgetting that I needed to be someplace else, like the staff meeting.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Robbie asked as we made our way down the hallway to the conference room.
I winced. “I’m having dinner with my parents tomorrow.”
“Is your mom still throwing every eligible lesbian in town your way?” she asked sympathetically.
“The last one was from Portland,” I said. “I think she’s running out of options in Seattle.”
“That’s impossible,” Robbie laughed. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a lesbian in Seattle.”
“Ugh, that’s a terrible metaphor.”
“Yeah, but my point stands. There are a ton of queer women in this city, but unfortunately a large chunk of them are fundamentally undatable.”
Unlike me Robbie desperately wanted a relationship. Unfortunately she had terrible luck. Somehow she ended up with one horrible woman after another.
