And besides, those ladies looked after me. I wanted to tell them how stupid I’d been to try to go all the way out there to West LA like maybe somebody in that house really cared about me.
I was hoping maybe they could teach me to be smarter next time.
Phyllis was there waiting for me when I got back. Usually she went to sleep early, so that’s how I knew she was waiting up for me. I don’t know what time it was, but it took me forever to get home, so more or less the middle of the night.
Other than Phyllis there were just a few middle-aged guys standing around a trash can with a fire in it, just like you see in movies with homeless people or hoboes. I think that’s what you call a cliché, but it’s also what was happening. Everybody else had gone to sleep.
Phyllis was something like the queen of that place. Or maybe “queen” is the wrong word. Maybe she was almost more like an elder, except I know you’re not supposed to borrow words like that because they belong to Native Americans and I try not to be disrespectful. Just, right now I can’t think of a better word.
“Where you been?” she asked me.
I couldn’t really see her face in the dark, but then this big web of lightning lit up the sky and then I saw her, and she didn’t look mad. So I relaxed some. A big wind was coming up, and you could feel the energy of a storm. It was one of those nights that’s a really good time to have four walls and a door to close.
She had a couple of teeth missing and the ones she had didn’t look so good, but otherwise she kept herself clean and looked pretty okay. I think she was older than sixty.
“I went to see Bodhi,” I said.
“All day?”
“And then I went to see that lady I was telling you about. To see if she actually cares anything about me.”
“And does she?”
“I don’t know. She moved away and even her mother doesn’t know where she is.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s that, then.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Just then the thunderclap caught up from that big thing of lightning. That was a pretty long time later, which meant it was far away, which was fine with me.
I sat down just inside her real tent. It had the flap end propped up so you could see the concrete river and the storm blowing our way. The river had some water starting to flow. I could barely see it but I could hear it, so it must have been raining pretty good, you know, farther upstream.
Phyllis was sitting cross-legged with her hands on her knees, palms up, which made it look like she was meditating or something.
“I saved you a can of soup,” she said.
“Where did we get cans of soup?”
“Willie brought a couple dozen.”
“Did he steal them?”
I was trying to decide if I could eat them if they were stolen.
“I don’t think so. The cans are dented and they’ve got no labels. So I don’t think they can sell them in that shape.”
“So they were giving them away to him?”
She snorted in a way that sounded half like laughing. “They don’t give nothing away to us or anybody else,” she said. “They throw it all in the dumpster and Willie goes diving.”
“Got it,” I said. “I’d like some soup. Thanks for saving it. What kind of soup is it?”
“Surprise soup,” she said. “Because it’s got no labels.”
She pulled a can out of the pocket of her sweater and started opening it with this really vicious-looking can opener. It didn’t have a little wheel. It had something more like a hooked blade that kept scooping in and tearing the tin of the lid. I’d actually seen it before but I swear I thought it was for self-defense.
She carried the open can over to the guys by the fire, and they heated it up for me by holding it out over the flames with this thing that looked like a wire hanger twisted into a long handle.
While they were heating it up she came back and sat with me.
“Thing is,” I said, “now I’ll always wonder.”
“No, you’ll know when they bring the can back what kind it is.”
I laughed, and it felt good to laugh about something. “No, not that. I meant I’ll always wonder if that Brooke lady cared about me at all.”
We watched the dark clouds roll in for a minute, looking kind of scary. A good storm always looks safer and better through a double-pane window.
“Maybe she wants to care about you,” she said.
“Yeah. Maybe. That’s kind of how it seemed when I was with her.”
“People like that don’t mean no harm, hon. There’s just so many of us, and they each figure there’s only one of them. They get overwhelmed. Don’t take it personal.”
“I don’t,” I said.
But I kind of had, until she said that.
Then I saw the guy who was warming up my soup pull the can back in and touch the sides of it real carefully, and then he waved to me.
“You run and get that,” Phyllis said. “We’ll talk more in the morning if you like.”
I took the soup from the man, and he gave me a rag to hold it with because it was hot. I told him thanks, and he had a hat on, and he tipped it to me. It made me
