heart leaped. Her hands were sweaty on the handle of the suitcase. She looked behind her at the dilapidated old house with its sagging porch and peeling paint, her mother in a fancy dress and high heels with too much makeup on her thin face and black color on her thin hair. Marlene had been pretty once, but now she looked like a caricature of her old self, and her blue eyes were glazed most of the time. Since her lover’s death earlier in the year, she’d started to drink more heavily. The money he’d left her was running out, too. Soon, it would be gone and she’d want someone to support her, namely, her daughter.
Ivory was going to escape, though. She was going to get away from the smothering dependence of her mother and the contemptuous attitude of her community at last! She was going to make a name for herself. Then, one day, she’d come back here dressed in furs and glittering with diamonds, and then the people who’d made fun of her would see that she wasn’t worthless!
The late-model Ford stopped at the front gate, raising a cloud of dust on the farm road. Their neighbor, a middle-aged man in a suit, leaned across and pushed the door open.
“Hop in, girl, I’m late for my flight already,” he said kindly.
“Hello, Bartley,” Marlene said sweetly, leaning in the window after Ivory had closed the door. “My, don’t you look handsome today!”
Bartley smiled at her. “Hello, honey. You look pretty good yourself.”
“Come over for a drink when you have a minute,” she invited. “I’m going to be all alone now that my daughter’s deserting me.”
“Mother,” Ivory protested miserably.
“She thinks she wants to be a fashion designer. It doesn’t bother her in the least to leave me out here all alone with nobody to look after me if I get sick,” Marlene said on a sigh.
“You have the Blakes and the Harrises,” Ivory reminded her, “just up the road. And you’re perfectly healthy.”
“She likes to think so,” Marlene told Bartley. “Children can be so ungrateful. Now, you be sure to write, Ivory, and do try to stay out of trouble, because other people won’t be as understanding as I am about...well, about money disappearing.”
Ivory went red in the face. She’d never been in trouble, but her mother had most of the local people convinced that her daughter stole from her and attacked her. Ivory had never been able to contradict her successfully, because Marlene had a way of laughing and agreeing with her while her eyes made a lie of everything she said. At least she’d get a chance to start over in Houston.
“I don’t steal, Mother,” Ivory declared tensely.
Marlene smiled sweetly at Bartley and rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t, darling!”
“We’d better go,” Bartley said, uncomfortably restraining himself from checking to make sure his wallet was still in his hip pocket. “See you soon, Marlene.”
“You do that, Bartley, honey,” she drawled. She patted Ivory’s arm. “Be good, dear.”
Ivory didn’t say a word. Her mouth was tightly closed as the car pulled away. Her last sight of her mother was bittersweet, as she thought of all the pain and humiliation she’d suffered and how different everything could have been if her mother had wanted a child in the first place.
Houston might not be perfect, but it would give Ivory a chance at a career and a brighter future. Her mother wouldn’t be there to criticize and demean her. She would assume a life of class and style that would make her forget that she’d ever lived in Harmony, Texas. Once she made her way to the top, she thought, she’d never have to look back again.
THE NOVEMBER AIR was brisk and cold. The stark streetlights of the Queens neighborhood wore halos of frosty mist. The young woman, warm in her faded tweed overcoat and a white beret, sat huddled beside a small boy on the narrow steps of an apartment house that had been converted into a shelter for the homeless. She looked past the dingy faces of the buildings and the oil-stained streets. Her soft gray eyes were on the stars she couldn’t see. One day, she promised herself, she was going to reach right up through the hopelessness and grab one for herself. In fact, she was already on the way there. She’d won a national contest during her last month of design school in Houston, and first prize was a job with Kells-Meredith, Incorporated, a big clothing firm in New York City.
“What are you thinking about, Ivory?”
She glanced down at the small, dark figure sitting at her side. His curly brown hair was barely visible under a moth-eaten gray stocking cap. His jacket was shabbier than her tweed coat and his shoes were stuffed with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles. A tooth was missing where his father had hit him in a drunken rage a year or so before the family had lost their apartment. It was a permanent tooth, and it wouldn’t grow back. But there was no money for cosmetic dentistry. There wasn’t even enough money to fill a cavity.
“I’m thinking about a nice, warm room, Tim,” she said. She slid an affectionate arm around him and hugged him close for warmth. “Plenty of good food to eat. A car to drive. A new coat...a jacket for you,” she teased, and hugged him closer.
“Aw, Ivory, I don’t need a coat. This one’s fine!” His black eyes twinkled as he smiled up at her.
She remembered that smile from her first day as a volunteer at the homeless shelter, because Tim had been the first person she’d seen when she came with her friend Dee, who already worked there. Ivory had not been eager to offer her services at first, because the place brought back memories of the poverty she’d endured as a child in rural Texas. But her prejudice hadn’t lasted long. When she saw the people who were staying at the shelter, her compassion for them overcame her own bitterness.
Tim had been sitting on these same steps that first day. He and his mother had been staying at the homeless shelter along with his two sisters. It was a cold day and he wore only a torn jersey jacket. Ivory had sat down and talked with him while she waited for Dee. Afterward, when Dee had asked casually if Ivory would like to volunteer a day a week to work there with her, she had agreed. Now, she almost always found Tim waiting for her when she came on Saturdays. Sometimes she brought him candy, sometimes she had a more useful present, such as a pair of mittens or a cap.
Tim’s mother loved him and did all she could for him; but she also had a toddler and a nursing baby, and her situation, like that of so many, was all but hopeless. She had a low-paying job and the shelter did, at least, provide a home.
“I would like a room,” Tim mused, interrupting her thoughts. He’d propped his face in his hands and was dreaming. “And a cat. They don’t let us have cats at the shelter, you know, Ivory.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I made a new friend today,” he said after a companionable silence had passed.
“Did you?”
“He stays at the shelter sometimes. His name’s Jake.” He sighed. “He used to be a bundle boy in a manufacturing company. What’s a bundle boy, Ivory?”
“Someone who carries bundles of cut cloth to be sewn,” she explained. She worked in the fashion sector. It wasn’t the job she’d dreamed of, but
