Sometimes — and it doesn’t occur to me very often — there’s a good feeling that comes from helping others who, through no fault of their own, struggle every day to house and feed themselves and their family. We live in a great country, I believe; a country that (generally) offers opportunities to everyone to succeed. There are some, however, that fall through the cracks. It’s not that they are necessarily addicts or mentally ill, just circumstances have left them in a position that has them struggling for survival. I think we all need to be reminded that this could be us.

In December of 2015, early one morning, I was heading to a local grocery store. They open early and it’s easy, especially if you have a list (I always do), to get in, complete the list, and get home. I think it was around 7 am. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a car sitting next to the entry road. Behind it, I saw someone sitting there with a sign that read Please Help. Normally I just pass by, because there are a lot of “homeless” people that are in fact not, and are there to collect money — as much as $100 per day. We’re warned by local officials to be aware and that some (a few, not all) are just scamming the public.

In this case though I stopped. Why? There was a child, and so I thought at a minimum I could give the person there (wrapped up — it was chilly) a few dollars. As I approached I saw it was a young woman with a child, a little girl, maybe four or five years old. As I approached her I asked if I could help her. She responded that anything I could give would help, as they lived in the car. After maybe two minutes, I discovered that she was a veteran, separated from the Army a few years prior. Of course, I didn’t immediately believe her until she showed me her military ID.

I was shocked. Not that I had not seen or read about other veterans in similar circumstances, but here I was, in front of a young woman, with a child, a veteran, homeless. I couldn’t believe it, even though I’ve heard the statistics that there are some 50,000 veterans on the street, homeless. Some have problems, drugs and or alcohol, but there are others with PTSD, and just some that have had bad luck.

Shay is one of those with the latter two, as I discovered. She’s an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran that fell upon hard times. Not ju
st hard times, but to the degree that her parents rejected her, even though she had a small child at the time. That’s a longer, more emotional story that I won’t get into here because it’s personal and I am one of the few, according to her, that know it. If you’re a woman, and a veteran, you might have an insight.

I did something way outside anything I would normally do: I brought them home with me. I know, it doesn’t seem rational, but I could not allow this young woman with a four year old stay on the street. I know people that run a couple of shelters here and my thought was that I could at minimum get them into a shelter. So they came into my home.

In the meantime, I started making calls, and discovered that the shelters were full, but one friend was willing to make room for a single woman with a child. Good, I thought. At least there was a fallback if everything else fell through.

Speaking with her I discovered that she had been a satellite technician in the Army. Hey, I thought, I know someone that may be able to help her. I called my friend Will, a government employee who was in charge of satellite operations here. Yes, there were openings, and after explaining the situation, convinced him, just a couple days before Christmas, to have him and his contract manager interview Shay. I told her at dinner. The next day, I took her to the site where she went through an interview that lasted an hour. My friend came out smiling, telling me, “She’s good”, then Shay and the contract manager came out.

He wanted to hire her. I looked at my friend and Shay and then at him and said, “Well, $70K should be a decent start, shouldn’t it?” My friend said “Yes”, which ended any negotiation at that point.

She started the job right after Christmas. In the meantime, there was the question of where she and her daughter were going to live, because my spare bedroom was a bridge, not a destination. I called Mike, who managed an apartment complex about a block from my place, and asked if he had anything open. He happened to have a two bedroom. I told him to hold it, went straight over, and paid the deposit on the spot so it couldn’t get away. I paid the first and last month’s rent too — she had just started a job and had no money, which is the whole chicken-and-egg problem of being homeless with a job offer. Then we went out and found some furniture. Nothing fancy, but adequate: beds, a couch, a table, a TV. Enough to make an apartment into a home. The place came ready on the first, we got the furniture in, and she and her daughter moved into their own home.

They had stayed with me a couple of weeks by then. I was working from home, so I watched her daughter during the day, and even after the move she dropped her off at my place around 6:30 in the morning on her way to work. And once she started school, the routine just changed shape instead of ending: breakfast at my house, then I’d get her down to the bus stop at the end of my street. At first I took her to school and picked her up; later she took the bus, and I’d watch her walk down and cross the street to it, because people drove that street like it was a drag strip and it worried me every single morning. After school she came back to my house for a snack and waited until her mother got off about four and came by. Half the time, since I was already making dinner, they just stayed and ate with me.

In time they moved out of the apartment and rented a house in another part of town — she wanted a house instead of an apartment, and I couldn’t blame her. We still saw each other all the time: they were over for dinner, or I was over at their place. We were, in the way that counts, kind of family. I was all she had.

Here’s the part that tells you who she is. She made me keep every receipt — the deposit, the rent, the furniture, all of it — and give them to her. And over the next several months, less than six, she paid me back every cent. Every cent. I would have let it go. She wouldn’t.

That was eleven years ago. She’s still there. She’s the on-site task supervisor now, and I believe she’s into six figures — a long way from living in a car with a four year old. Her daughter is fifteen now, and in high school. We talk regularly, though I haven’t seen them in person since I moved away. She knows where I am and what I’ve been through since, the same way I know her story. We’re friends. That’s the word for it.

I didn’t rescue anybody, whatever it may look like. She was a good technician who had fallen on horrible circumstances, and she did the work — all of it. I just happened to be the one who stopped that morning, when everybody’s first instinct, including mine on most mornings, is to drive on by.