The Park Avenue Hovel, page nine

Ray's letter, in substance, was not unexpected; it was the particulars that Michael had to know, and couldn't face. Funding for the shelter was always tight: the counselling center kept above water fairly easily, an obvious community resource the city couldn't excuse cutting off, but the night shelter for at-risk and homeless youth had a harder time staving off crusading law-and-order councilmen who called it criminal coddling and tried to shut it down. Ray had a few choice things to say about the last mayor, whom Michael knew, and the new one, whom he only dreaded, but reported happily that the new Social Services director was not the kind of bleeding-heart idiot the last one had been, instead willing to take suggestions and favor experience over ideology.
They were still, always, fighting a losing battle out there. Ray didn't need to tell him that, and he didn't, focusing instead on particulars, details and progress on cases he'd been working on before Michael left, some he'd taken on since. There was hardly any mention in his letters of Michael's old cases, an omission of either tact or the opposite, and Michael went back and forth on which he thought it was. If Ray wanted to think the worst of him, he had good reason: Michael had run out on those kids, abandoned them to the monsters he was supposed to fight. If he was just trying to be kind, to shield Michael for a time from reports of the things that had driven him away, give him time for his own wounds to heal, then Michael could appreciate that; Ray knew him as well as anyone, too, and knew that his guilt would make any news harder to hear. In any case, he kept writing, and Michael kept reading: it wasn't much, but it was something.

Posted at Sunday, February 7, 2010 04:28 PM
In Ongoing Category | Permalink