The Greatest Gift Read online

  The man sized up her callused hands and worn appearance. Three kids, she’d said, and judging by the way her shoes and sweater looked, it wasn’t easy buying much, especially food.

  “Sure, we have them,” he said kindly. “And we’re running a special,” he lied. “I’ll be just a minute.”

  She stood there in her sensible clothes feeling uncomfortable, but it only took a minute for the man to come back, smiling, with a plastic bag.

  “That will be exactly five dollars,” he said gently.

  She grinned, handing him the bill. “Thanks a million!”

  He nodded. “You’re very welcome.”

  She took the chicken strips back to the motel and shared them around. There were so many that they all had seconds. She was over the moon. But there was always tomorrow, she worried.

  She needn’t have. The next afternoon, when she dragged in after work, she found the man from the restaurant on her doorstep.

  “Look, I don’t want to insult you or anything,” he said gently. “But I know from your manager here that you’re having a rough time. We always have food left over at night at our restaurant,” he said kindly. “You see, we can’t carry it over until the next day, it has to be thrown out. I could let you have what there is. If it wouldn’t insult you. If you’d like it?”

  “I’d like it,” she said at once, and smiled. “Oh, I’d like it so much! Thank you.”

  He flushed. “It’s no problem. Really. If you don’t mind coming over about ten o’clock, just as we’re closing?”

  She laughed. “I’ll be there. And thank you!”

  She went to the restaurant exactly at ten, feeling a little nervous, but everybody welcomed her. Nobody made her feel small.

  The restaurant assistant manager went to the back and had the workers fill a huge bag full of vegetables and meats and fruits in neat disposable containers. He carried it to the front and presented it to Mary with a flourish. “I hope you and the children enjoy it,” he added with a smile.

  She started to open her purse.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t need to offer to pay anything. This would only go into the garbage,” he said gently. “That’s the truth. I’d much rather see it used and enjoyed.”

  “I’m Mary Crandall,” she said. “My children and I thank you,” she added proudly.

  “I’m Cecil Baker,” he replied. “I’m the assistant manager here. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” she said huskily. “Thank you so much.”

  “It’s my pleasure. I hate waste. So much food goes into the trash, when there are people everywhere starving. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed.

  “Here. I’ll get the door for you.”

  She grinned up at him as she went out. “I can’t wait to see the children’s faces. They were only hoping for a chicken finger apiece,” she added, chuckling.

  He smiled, but pity was foremost in his mind. He watched her walk back the way she’d come, to the small motel.

  Mary walked into the motel with her bag. Bob and Ann looked up expectantly from the board game they were playing. The toddler, John, was lying between them on the floor, playing with his toes.

  “More chicken strips?” Bob asked hopefully.

  “I think we have something just a little better than that,” she said, and put her bag down on the table by the window. “Bob, get those paper plates and forks that we got at the store, would you?”

  Bob ran to fetch them as Ann lifted John in her arms.

  Mary opened the bag and put out container after container of vegetables, fruits and meats. There were not only chicken strips, but steak and fish as well. The small refrigerator in the room would keep the meats at a safe temperature, which meant that this meager fare would last for two days at least. It would mean that Mary could save a little more money for rent. It was a windfall.

  She held hands with the children and she said grace before they ate. Life was being very good to her, despite the trials of the past week.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARY TOOK THE CHILDREN with her to the grocery store on Friday afternoon. It was raining and cold. Trying to juggle John, who was squirming, and the paper bag containing the heaviest of their purchases, milk and canned goods, she dropped it.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she groaned. “Here, Ann, honey, take John while I run down the cans of tuna fish…!”

  “I’ll get them,” came a deep voice from behind her. “I’m a fair fisherman, actually, but catching cans of tuna is more my style.”

  Mary turned and saw a police officer grinning at her. She recognized him at once. “Officer Clark!” she exclaimed. “How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for us?” she exclaimed. “Bev has been wonderful. We have a place to stay, now, too!”

  He held up a hand, smiling. “You don’t need to thank me, Mrs. Crandall. It was my pleasure.”

  In the clear daylight, without the mental torment that had possessed her at their first meeting, she saw him in a different way. He was several years older than she was, tall and a little heavy, but not enough to matter. He was good-looking. “You seem to have your hands full as it is,” he added, scooping up the cans and milk jug. “I’ll carry them for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, flustered.

  He shrugged. “It isn’t as if I’m overwhelmed with crime in this neighborhood,” he said, tongue-in-cheek. “Jaywalking and petty theft are about it.”

  “Our car’s over here. Well, it’s not really our car,” she added, and then could have bitten her tongue.

  “You stole it, I guess,” the policeman sighed. “And here I thought I was going to end my shift without an hour’s paperwork.”

  “I didn’t steal it!” she exclaimed, and then laughed. “My employer let me borrow it…”

  “On account of Dad taking our car away after he left us,” Bob muttered.

  The policeman pursed his lips. “That’s a pretty raw way to treat someone.”

  “Alcohol and drugs,” she said, tight-lipped.

  He sighed. “I have seen my share of that curse,” he told her. “Are all these really yours?” he added, nodding toward the kids. “You didn’t shoplift these fine children in the store?” he added with mock suspicion.

  The children were laughing, now, too. “We shoplifted her,” Bob chuckled. “She’s a great mom!”

  “She keeps house for people,” Ann added quietly.

  “She works real hard,” Bob agreed.

  “Have you got a house?” the policeman asked.

  “Well, we’re living in a motel. Just temporarily,” Mary said at once, flushing. “Just until we find something else.”

  The policeman waited for Mary to unlock the trunk and he put the groceries he was carrying into it gingerly. Bob and Ann added their packages.

  “Thanks again, Officer Clark,” Mary said, trying not to let him see how attractive she found him. It was much too soon for that.

  “Do you have any kids?” Ann asked him, looking up with her big eyes.

  “No kids, no family,” he replied with a sad smile. “Not by choice, either.”

  He looked as if he’d had a hard life. “Well, if you haven’t stolen the car, and you need no further assistance, I’ve no choice but to go back to my car and try to catch a speeder or two before my shift ends. I hope I’ll see you around again, Mrs. Crandall…. Mary.”

  “Are you married?” she blurted out.

  He chuckled. “Not hardly. I entered the divorced state ten years ago, and I heartily recommend it. Much better than verbal combat over burned potatoes every single night.”

  “Your wife couldn’t cook?” Mary asked involuntarily.

  “She wouldn’t cook and I couldn’t cook, which led to a lot of the combat,” he told her with a chuckle. “Drive safely, now.”

  “I will. You, too.”

  He walked off jauntily, with a wave of his hand.

  “And I used to think policemen w
ere scary,” Bob commented. “He’s really nice.”

  “He is, isn’t he?” Mary murmured, and she watched him as he got into his squad car and pulled out of the parking lot. She found herself thinking that she had a very odd sort of guardian angel in that police uniform.

  Mary went to her jobs with increasing lack of strength and vigor. She knew that some of the problem had to be stress and worry. Despite the safe haven she’d found, she knew that all her children had only her to depend on. Her parents were dead and there were no siblings. She had to stay healthy and keep working just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. In the middle of the night, she lay awake, worrying about what would happen if she should fail. The children would be split up and placed into foster homes. She knew that, and it terrified her. She’d always been healthy, but she’d never had quite so much responsibility placed on her, with so few resources to depend on. Somehow, she knew, God would find a way to keep her and the children safe. She had to believe that, to have faith, to keep going.

  Somehow, she promised herself, she would. After all, there were so many people who needed even more assistance than she did. She remembered the elderly gentleman at the homeless shelter, the mother with her new baby. The shelter had a small budget and trouble getting food.

  Food. Restaurants couldn’t save food. They had to throw it out. If the restaurant near Mary’s motel room had to throw theirs out, it was logical to assume that all the other restaurants had to throw theirs out, too.

  What a shame, she thought, that there were so many hungry people with no food, where there were also restaurants with enough leftover food to feed them. All people had to do was ask for it. But she knew that they never would. She never would have, in her worst circumstances. People were too proud to ask for charity.

  She put the thought into the back of her mind, but it refused to stay there. Over the next few days, she was haunted by the idea. Surely there were other people who knew about the restaurant leftovers, but when she began checking around, she couldn’t find any single charity that was taking advantage of the fact. She called Bev at the homeless shelter and asked her about it.

  “Well, I did know,” Bev confessed, “but it would entail a lot of work, coordinating an effort like that. I’ve sort of got my hands full with the shelter. And everybody I know is overworked and understaffed. There’s just nobody to do it, Mary. It’s a shame, too.”

  “Yes, it is,” Mary agreed.

  But it was an idea Mary couldn’t shake. Maybe nobody else was doing it because it was her job to do it, she thought suddenly. She’d always believed that people had purposes in life, things that they were put here on earth to do. But she’d thought hers was to be a wife and mother—and it was, for a time. But she had more to give than that. So perhaps here was her new purpose, looking her in the face.

  When she got off from work, she went to the restaurant where the assistant manager had given her the leftovers, and she spoke to him in private.

  “It’s just an idea,” she said quickly. “But with all the restaurants in the city, and all the hungry people who need it, there should be some way to distribute it.”

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” Cecil replied with a smile. “But there’s just no way to distribute it, you see. There’s no program in place to administrate it.”

  “Perhaps it could start with just one person,” she said. “If you’d be willing to give me your leftovers, I’ll find people to give them to, and I’ll distribute them myself. It would be a beginning.”

  He found her enthusiasm contagious. “You know, it would be a beginning. I’ll speak with the manager, and the owner, and you can check back with me on Monday. How would that be?”

  “That would be wonderful. Meanwhile, I’ll look for places to carry the food. I already have at least one in mind. And I’ll get recommendations for some others.”

  “Do you think you can manage all alone?” he wondered.

  “I have three children, two of whom are old enough to help me,” she replied. “I’m sure they’ll be enthusiastic as well.”

  They were. She was amazed and delighted at her children’s response to the opportunity.

  “We could help people like that old man at the shelter,” Bob remarked. “He was much worse off than us.”

  “And that lady with the little baby. She was crying when nobody was looking,” Ann told them.

  “Then we’ll do what we can to help,” Mary said. She smiled at her children with pride. “The most precious gift we have is the ability to give to others less fortunate.”

  “That’s just what our teacher said at Christmas,” Bob said, “when he had us make up little packages for kids at the battered women’s shelter.”

  “That’s one place we could check out, to see if they could use some of the restaurant food,” Mary thought aloud. “I’m sure we’ll find other places, too,” she added. “It will mean giving up some things ourselves, though,” she told them. “We’ll be doing this after school and after work every day, even on weekends.”

  Bob and Ann grinned. “We won’t mind.”

  Mary gathered them all close, including little John, and hugged them. “You three are my greatest treasures,” she said. “I’m so proud of you!”

  Monday when she went back to the restaurant, Cecil was grinning from ear to ear. “They went for it,” he told her. “The manager and the owner agreed that it would be a wonderful civic contribution. I want to do my bit, as well, so I’ll pay for your gas.”

  She caught her breath. “That’s wonderful of you. Of all of you!”

  “Sometimes all it takes is one person to start a revolution, of sorts,” he told her. “You’re doing something wonderful and unselfish. It shames people who have more and do less.”

  She chuckled. “I’m no saint,” she told him. “I just want to make a little difference in the world and help a few people along the way.”

  “Same here. So when do you start?”

  “Tomorrow night. I’m already getting referrals.”

  “I’ll expect you at closing time.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Mary was enthusiastic about her project, and it wasn’t difficult to find people who needed the food. One of the women she cleaned for mentioned a neighbor who was in hiding with her two children, trying to escape a dangerously abusive husband who’d threatened to kill her. She was afraid to go to a shelter, and she had no way to buy food. Mary took food to her in the basement of a church, along with toys and clothes for the children that had been provided by her employer. The woman cried like a baby. Mary felt wonderful.

  The next night, she took her box of food to the homeless shelter where the elderly man was staying. The residents were surprised and thrilled with the unexpected bonanza, and Bev, who ran the shelter, hugged her and thanked her profusely for the help. Mary made sure that Meg, the young woman with the baby, also had milk, which the restaurant had included two bottles of in the box. The elderly man, whom Bev had told her was called Sam Harlowe, delved into the food to fetch a chicken leg. He ate it with poignant delight and gave Mary a big smile of thanks.

  On her third night of delivering food, after the children had helped her divide it into individual packages, Mary decided that there might be enough time to add another restaurant or two to her clientele.

  She wrote down the names and numbers of several other restaurants in the city and phoned them on her lunch hour. The problem was that she had no way for them to contact her. She didn’t have a phone and she didn’t want to alienate her motel manager by having the restaurants call him. She had to call back four of them, and two weren’t at all interested in participating in Mary’s giveaway program. It was disappointing, and Mary felt morose. But she did at least have the one restaurant to donate food. Surely there would be one or two others eventually.

  She phoned the remaining four restaurants the next night after work and got a surprise. They were all enthusiastic about the project and more than willing to donate
their leftovers.

  Mary was delighted, but it meant more work. Now, instead of going next door to get food and parcel it up, she had to drive halfway across town to four more restaurants and wait until the kitchen workers got the leftovers together for her. This meant more work at the motel, too, making packages to take to the various shelters and families Mary was giving food to.

  It was a fortunate turn of events, but Mary was beginning to feel the stress. She was up late, and she was tired all the time. She worked hard at her jobs, but she had no time for herself. The children were losing ground on homework, because they had less time to do it.

  What Mary needed very much were a couple of volunteers with time on their hands and a willingness to work. Where to find them was going to be a very big problem.

  * * *

  She stopped by the homeless shelter to talk with the manager and see if they could use more food, now that Mary was gaining new resources. Bev was on the phone. She signaled that she’d be through in a minute. While she waited, Mary went to talk to Mr. Harlowe, who was sitting morosely in the corner with a cup of cold coffee.

  “You still here?” Mary asked with a gentle smile.

  He looked up and forced an answering smile. “Still here,” he replied. “How are you doing?”

  She sat down. “I’ve got a place to live, clothes for the children and this new project of distributing donated food in my spare time.”

  He chuckled. “With three kids, I don’t imagine you’ve got much of that!”

  “Actually, I was hoping to find a volunteer to help me.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and took a sip of coffee. “What sort of volunteer?”

  “Somebody to help me pick up and deliver the food.”

  He perked up with interest. “The last time you delivered food here, Bev said something about what you’ve been doing. But she didn’t go into specifics about how all this came about. Tell me more.”