That’s great, thank you. I’ll send her over.

I hang up. I expect that Randolph House will be calmer this time. That’s fine. I know what to say.

Randolph has a bed, I tell her. Took a while but it was worth the wait.

I flash her a quick reassuring smile. I expect her to look relieved. Instead, she crosses her arms and stares at the floor.

What’s wrong? I ask.

May I see the woman who was just here?

Katie?

Is that her name?

Yes. Why?

I just want to. I liked her. Can’t I?

Of course. Sure, you can, but it would be a mistake. You need to go to Randolph House now or you’ll lose your bed.

I’ll go, but I want to see Katie first.

Her voice rises, cracks. Nervous but insistent. Almost annoyed. At me. My mind goes blank. I don’t know what to say.

Just go to the shelter, I insist. I try not to sound angry, control the tone of my voice.

She stands.

Where’re you going?

To see her. Katie.

She walks out the door.

Wait.

She turns to me. A determined stare. I drum my fingers against my desk. She doesn’t move. She’s already gone. I’ve lost her.

The other woman, the man’s wife, she did as I told her. Tears inside my apartment but no questions. I wonder where she went after she left the next morning. Did she meet her husband? I assume she did, assume she told him nothing. I didn’t expect to see them again and I didn’t. Where did they go? Maybe it worked out for them; maybe it didn’t.

Just a minute, I say again. Wait here.

I stand, walk past her and into the drop-in. A missed opportunity. It happens. I imagine her staring after me and regretting her decision. Too late. I reject her. That’s how I roll.

I stop at Katie’s desk. A woman sits beside her. Circles of pink rouge make the woman’s pale, tense face look even paler.

My client wants to speak with you, I say.

Oh?

I’ll send her over.

I’m doing an intake.

I look at her client. She stares straight ahead. Thirtyish. She smells of cigarettes. But the way her straw-colored hair trails down to the small of her back interlaced in one long braid appeals to me. She spent a little time on herself making that braid.

Take my client, I say. I’ll finish here for you.

Tom

I look at my watch. Five o’clock. I’ve been at work since seven. I’m expecting a call from the mayor’s office. Probably too late, city offices are closed by now, but I’ll give it a few more minutes. I go over my staff list and have barely begun going through it when the reception desk phone rings. I jump in anticipation.

A call for you, Tom, Jay shouts.

Send it through.

Jay patches the call to my phone.

Fresh Start, may I help you? I say. You want to donate clothes? Well, just bring them down. Park behind the building and ring the bell. Thank you for thinking of the homeless. Have a good day.

I hang up.

We don’t need more clothes, we’ve got tons, but if someone gives you pants and shirts one day, they might give you a check the next. So I accept their stuff. After they drop it off, I’ll ask a volunteer to take it to the Salvation Army. Our clothes closet is full. I could use underwear and socks, but those things rarely get donated. I think people would feel self-conscious giving away their old underwear. I get it. It’d be weird. So buy some and donate new underwear. No one does that, or at least very few. They’ll write me a check. But ask them to buy new clothes and give them to me, no way. Doesn’t happen.

I pick up the staff list again.

The California State Assembly and governor agreed on a budget last night that will slash social services statewide. The cuts will be passed on to cities. Our mayor will make noise about trying to absorb them, how he’ll lobby the governor. Some years he means it. Sometimes it helps but not much. A few thousand dollars saved here and there. Not enough. Never enough to avoid deep cuts of some kind. Once all the posturing is out of the way, social service providers like me with city contracts will get a call from the mayor’s homeless coordinator. He’ll tell each of us how much our budgets have been reduced. I’m waiting for his call.

Budget redistribution, as the city calls it, always boils down to laying off staff, something my contract forbids. It doesn’t look good for a helping agency that hires the homeless to terminate employees. So the city passes along budget cuts but forbids me to reduce staff. However, my contract allows for transition opportunities. No one gets laid off. Instead, I transition them out. It’s just words, man. I can play the game.

In the past, I’ve made these opportunities available to staff I thought had a good chance of finding work elsewhere, staff who had acquired some education before their addictions consumed them, who had at least a minimal work history that preceded their time with me. Last year, I transitioned Shelley, our alcoholism counselor. She has a master’s degree in sociology and was more than qualified for the position, but she showed little initiative and spent most of her time on her phone chatting with friends. Faced with budget cuts, I eliminated her position. She took it hard. I lied and told her it had nothing to do with her job performance. That it was solely a budgetary decision. Dollars and cents. I had to cut somewhere. I didn’t see the point of scolding her for her lackadaisical attitude. Frankly, she could have been God’s gift, but because she was one of my higher-paid staff I probably would have cut her anyway. I heard she got married and has a kid on the way. That’s good. That’s nice. I’m glad she’s doing all right. I wish I had a few more like her. But after years of transition opportunities, I’m pretty much out of people like Shelley. I’m left with staff who have been homeless, some of them for years. They have problems, ongoing mental health and other issues that mean they won’t enter the traditional workforce anytime soon. Only another social services agency would hire them, but the directors of those programs are doing what I’m doing: cutting staff.

My program coordinator, Don, walks into the office. He calls himself codirector because I include him in decision-making. Some people are like that; their job title means everything and codirector sounds better to him, I suppose, than program coordinator. It’s about power, prestige, some need for his self-esteem, but he’s not my equal. On the staff flowchart his name is right below mine and he knows it. We all answer to somebody and he answers to me. I’m not heavy with it. I don’t lord it over him or anyone. But I am the director. Just saying.

I get up, pace around my office, sit down again. I wish the mayor’s office would call. I want to know what I’ll have to do, how deep I have to cut. It won’t make it any easier, but at least I’d know and could get it over with, crunch the numbers, who stays, who goes. Hired one year, gone the next. That’s how it works. Fired, laid off, transitioned, it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s all the same, someone’s out of a job. The look in their eyes. The sense of betrayal. The tears. All the self-respect they had clawed back into their lives after years of screwing up—or maybe not screwing up but just experiencing bad luck—gone in the two or three sentences it takes me to tell them they’re out of job. What will they have left? A room at a residential hotel they will no longer be able to afford, a tab at a convenience store they will no longer be able to pay, a mirror over a sink they’ll no longer want to look at, that’s what. I’ll see them back on the street in no time, back to passed out on the sidewalks and in doorways or asleep in our homeless shelter, back in line at the DSS applying for whatever benefit they might be eligible for, and they’ll be back the next day and the day after that until it’s time to return to the shelter, a homeless person’s version of nine to five, an indistinguishable mass of men and women in ill-fitting thrift-store clothes, as if they’d never been employed by me or anyone. As if standing in line and sleeping in a shelter had always been their life. After a while, it probably feels that way.

I look at my staff list and pause at Don’s name. He could easily get another job. College educated, master’s degrees in theology and sociology. Never been homeless. He lives as middle-class an existence as I do. I like him. More than that it helps having someone in charge when I’m out of the building, but now I have to decide whether to keep him or cut him so another staff person less likely to find another job can stay. Everyone’s expendable. Don understands that. Or he will.

Jay’s phone rings again and he transfers the call to me. As I pick up the receiver, Don lights a smoke and takes the staff list from me. After a moment, I hang up.

More clothing donations, I say.

He thrusts the list at me.

You marked my name?

Just an ink mark, Don. I was counting the number of staff with my pen, how we can combine positions to make up for any staff cuts. I’ve made no decisions.