She was going to move to where people had money
Iwent shopping in Wellsburg a long, long time ago. Wellsburg is a town in the chimney of West Virginia, about forty minutes from Pittsburgh and ten from my home in Steubenville. It’s not one of those West Virginia towns you could drive right through without knowing you’d been in a town at all.
It’s the big kind of town, the kind that takes five minutes to get through and has a few red lights. It’s not the horrifying type of small town in Northern Appalachia, with a great big hulking steel mill slowly rotting into the Ohio river.
The pretty type of town
It’s the pretty type, the type that looks like a setting for a Mark Twain novel or a picture book by Robert McCloskey. A place where you can’t imagine-something going wrong.
I remember that I was walking down Charles Street with my daughter in the stroller, My daughter is twelve now, so this must have been over a decade ago.
I passed by a shop with a Christmas tree in the window, displaying a rainbow of colorful patchwork owls for sale. That was the only thing this shop seemed to be selling. I would have continued down the street if the shopkeeper hadn’t run out to stop me.
“I’ve got baby clothes!” she coaxed. “Lots of them! They’re cheap!”
She had an Appalachian accent — not a harsh scratchy Steubenville bray but the kind that meant she was from deeper in the mountains. Maybe that was what made me come inside.
The shop had barely anything for sale besides those owls. There was a small rack of beautiful patchwork rectangles, which I thought were coverings for a twin bed but which turned out to be runners for a fancy dining table. There was a small rack of quilted place mats to match the table runners.
There was a rack of secondhand clothing for a baby girl far to one side. Toward the counter was the baby girl, meticulously clean and carefully dressed, pretending to cook breakfast at a lavish wooden kitchen full of miniature plastic dishes and wholesome plastic fruits and vegetables. My daughter toddled over to help the baby with her chores.
Let’s say the little girl’s name was Cherry. Cherry’s mother told me the name of the shop, which wasn’t stenciled on the sign or the window outside — let’s say it was The Cherry Boutique.
The lady apologized to me that there wasn’t very much for sale at the Cherry Boutique. Her friend was going to bring her own sewing projects to sell in the shop as well, but the friend had not showed up.
“Nobody buys things like this here,” she remarked. “Nobody can afford to. I’m goin’ to move down to Wheeling, where people have money.”
My unasked question
Next thing I knew, my daughter toddled away from the toy food to help herself to some real snacks she’d noticed. Beside the bathroom door at the back of the shop was a discreet stack of noodle soup cups and granola bars, plus an electric teakettle and some plastic utensils.
Bending over to collect my daughter, I saw the bed — a mattress on the floor behind the counter where the cash register would have been if there had been
one. It was neatly made up with the blankets pulled tight, not with a colorful quilt but a worn gray comforter and one pillow.
Cherry’s mother answered my unasked question, calmly, still smiling. “Have to be out of this building by next week. Cherry’s father, he left us and we lost the apartment. After that we didn’t have anywhere to stay, so we moved into the store. It worked fine until it started to get cold.”
The landlord, she said, turns off the heat at night. “And then he found out we were livin’ here, so he evicted us. I’ve gotta sell everything so we can go to Wheeling and get a new shop. These are old clothes Cherry’s outgrown, they might fit your girl. Cherry, you share those toys!”
This is just to say that the homeless are all around us, and homelessness doesn’t look the way you think.
Sometimes homelessness looks like a tent in the park in a bad part of a big city, and sometimes homelessness looks like a person in a shabby coat rattling a cup on the curb in front of a skyscraper, but sometimes it looks like a display of colorful owls in a shop in a quaint small town.
Sometimes homelessness looks like somebody staying for too long in a cheap motel, and sometimes it looks like somebody sleeping in their car, and sometimes it looks like a bed behind a counter. Sometimes homeless people look dirty and frightening, and those people deserve our help.
Seeing homeless people
But sometimes homeless people look like clean, healthy babies playing with toy food. Sometimes it looks like artists who make colorful quilts for somebody else’s banquet while feeding themselves on granola bars and instant soup in an unheated store front at night.
I still have the little secondhand baby coat I bought from Cherry’s mother, to help her get to Wheeling. My daughter wore it for two years. I never saw either of them again. Wherever they are, I hope they’re happy.