Pumpkin Bread

Talking heads on the early news in Pamela Forrest’s kitchen advised viewers to buy milk and staples in bulk, and to check the TV station’s website for on-line announcements of school closings the next morning. This was because the Blizzard of 2004 was going to dump at least ten inches of snow on New York City by noon that day. At ten of nine, though, the storm was just a concept. Pam had other things to focus on, particularly her job at SafePlace, a midtown homeless shelter where she was Director of Administrative Services. While it was still semi-dark, she turned off the TV and left her apartment for the 110th Street express #2 train from Central Park North to Times Square. A thirty-nine-year-old single mother of a college-aged daughter she’d adopted ten years ago, Pam Forrest was tall and big-boned, with shoulder-length dreadlocks. She had a broad, high forehead, almond-shaped eyes and nostrils that flared when she laughed. Her lips were full and her skin was the color of a cinnamon stick. She looked like a voluptuous Cassandra Wilson, with fuller thighs and a fleshy behind that made people turn to look at it when she got on subway cars or in lines at the bank. After a subway ride to Times Square and a walk to the shelter, she went into the conference room to look for SafePlace Executive Director Delores Burrows, her boss. Instead, she found Cheri Allen, the new receptionist, who was sitting with her back to the conference room table, staring out the window with a charcoal stick in her right hand and a large pad of paper on her lap. When she’d gotten hired six weeks ago, she got permission from Delores to come in early to draw. “What are you working on?” asked Pam, who was used to seeing Cheri in the conference room, where the Angela Davis and Assata Shakur posters were thumb-tacked to the graying walls. The room had a green rug gone see-through with overuse and a 60’s-era oak conference table. “I’m playing with light in this one,” Cheri said. “This area studies the early morning shadows.” Blah, blah, blah, Pam thought. In a month and a half, Pam had observed Cheri brushing her bangs away from her eyes every time she answered the phone. She wished she’d go back to one of the long-term temping assignments she’d bragged about supporting herself with before coming to SafePlace permanently—six weeks at this bank, four months at that university, a summer at a law firm, all so she could focus on her art. Delores came into the conference room shortly before nine with a stack of manila folders and a calculator to work on the shelter’s budget. Delores had been executive directing the shelter since the days when Angela Davis and Assata Shakur posters were sold on 125th Street. She had the only spacious office in the shelter, but even with an extra heater, its hissing radiator kept the room too cold, which brought her into the conference room to do paperwork. “Almost time, babe,” she told Cheri, who had to be at the reception desk when the phone started ringing at nine. “Ten more minutes?” asked Cheri. About to turn twenty-eight, she had on black dry clean-only slacks and a clingy maroon sweater with a faux-fur neckline. Her skin was the color of powdered ginger and she wore her sandy brown hair in a fluffy twist. “I need to work out an experience I had with my now ex-roommate. I can think better with charcoal in my hand.” Pam always did whatever Delores asked, so the nerve of Cheri to do otherwise made her want to sit down and listen. This was an especially welcome conversation to overhear on a blizzard-ready day when nothing yet had happened to remind her of why she worked in the shelter, since money, power and prestige weren’t the reasons. “What’s going on?” Delores asked. Pam pulled out a chair at the same time, and sat down slowly, to seem both disinterested and on the fence about paying attention to issues Cheri was set to talk about. “It’s about where I’m living. I was living with this other girl until about six months ago,” Cheri began, “but then I found my own place, a two-bedroom in Park Slope. The only decent roommate I could find was this woman who works as an escort.” Cheri’s roommate, whom she found through an ad in the Village Voice, was a self-described “budding film star.” She had artificial breasts and paid the bills working for a service that sent her on outings with businessmen that usually ended up in bed. “We got into it last night when one of her dates”—she threw two fingers up to make quotation marks—“came over, and then he wouldn’t leave. I ended up calling the police.” “Why don’t you kick her out?” Delores said. “Isn’t your name on the lease?” “Yeah, she’s out,” Cheri said. “She’s gone. Now I have to find someone else.” Good luck with that, Pam thought, and walked across the reception area outside the conference room to her office. From her desk, she looked through the splatters of grit on her window and up at the congested gray sky. Then she scanned the familiar objects on her desk. Of the four framed photographs, the largest was of her adopted daughter Jennifer, a twenty-year-old Hunter College freshman photographed at their kitchen table, smiling haltingly and wearing a sleeveless top. Beside it was a ten-year-old photo of her mother and her sister Andrea, their arms slung around each other’s necks. The picture next to that was of Pam and her best friend, Stacy Butler, lounging windblown on poolside chairs in St. Martin. On the left side of the computer was a silver frame of her most serious former boyfriend, Kofi Hardway. Even though she hadn’t seen him in years, their connection was still as palpable as a severed foot that still itched and tickled. In the photo, he was staring at the camera with something on his mind that only people as close to him as Pam would understand. Outside her gritty window, the sky was steely and opaque; the snow would come any second. She pulled from her computer monitor a Post-It she’d stuck to it the night before. In her backhand lefty script it said: Place ad in Monster for new PT art therapist Send thank you cards to volunteer dentists & hairdresser Have Cheri pick up fliers and messenger newsletter to printer Get pick-up service to wash donated clothes Discharge Jerry Fletcher By 11:15, the sky was nearly solid white, with a constant and steady output of flakes that crystallized on her windowpane. Looking at the violent snowfall made her cold—this was bubble bath weather. By one o’clock, nearly every item on her list was crossed off; the only thing left was to finalize the release of a befuddled client named Jerry Fletcher, whose allotted time in the shelter was coming to an end that day. He was one of the shelter’s many lost souls—he wore polyester shirts buttoned to the top, and a battered pair of aviator glasses with a lens only on the right side. Before coming to the shelter, he’d rented rooms in flophouses and taken jobs delivering car parts or busing tables, always trying to stay afloat without any family. Then one day, some teenagers beat and robbed him as he came out of a check-cashing place with a month’s earnings, and he eventually found his way to SafePlace. When Delores came into Pam’s office, the snow was pouring from the sky like someone was shaking it from an urn. “Why don’t you get home?” Delores said. She was wearing a wool hat and down Michelin-man coat. “I let Mr. Fletcher know we’d hold off on discharging him until after the blizzard.” Pam nodded with relief—no one could be discharged into this. “Oh, did I tell you? Next Friday night I’m having a potluck at my house. Seven o’clock.” Delores, who was widowed and whose only son lived in Atlanta, organized potluck dinners every few months for her friends in the city’s social service community—neighbors she’d gotten to know over the years, and craft workshop classmates who came over with foil-wrapped casseroles or bags of nachos. She’s going to invite Cheri, too, Pam thought with dread as she s