“Can they stay with you?”
“Don’t try to make me the villain here. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”
“Well ok. How quickly do you think you can have her out of here?”
“We’ll take as long as we want.” With that the aunt barged her way out almost knocking down two or three other guests who had come into the office.
“Hi, how can I help you?” John tried to put a friendly smile on though it is certain that he was fairly rattled by what had just taken place.
“I’m looking for a place to stay. Is there room?”
“Are you looking for a place with kids or without?” Deep inside John was hoping without since those beds were already put together. The only open mom room was now being vacated in room 3.
“I have four kids.”
“I do have room. But it will take us just a bit to get it cleaned up. Can you wait in the dining room for a bit while we get it ready for you?”
Tears began streaming down the woman’s face. John handed her his hanky and she wiped the tears. “Yes, we’ll wait.” John showed the family to the dining room, gave them all some left over sack lunches and discovered that her name was Julie. She was fairly certain that her abusive husband would be coming around and that was why she kept looking over her shoulder toward the gate. “You’ll be safe here, Julie. God protects the ladies here.” As John made his way to get Becky whose social worker should be here by now he ran into two other ladies wanting a room. One was a mom and the other a single. If you can all wait here in the dining room I will figure out if we can help you.
Becky’s social worker looked way out of her element at the Crisis Shelter. It was pretty obvious that she had never so angry and also did not know why. “Can you come down to my office?”
The two ladies nodded and followed John toward his office.
“Can you maybe, tell me what happened?”
“She called my man a punk. So I told her that I would be taking her down.”
“So you threatened her?”
“Yeah but it wasn’t here. So you can’t do anything about it, you punk.”
A flash of anger shot from Becky’s eyes and John sensed the tensions inside of him skyrocket.
The social worker suddenly became visibly nervous.
“If you were threatening her, and I would say that you’re threatening me right now. You can’t stay here.”
The social worker tried to usher her from the room as her anger began to escalate. Fortunately, the social worker got Becky out the door and was helping to get her packed up. They were gone from the premises in less than ten minutes.
John took a deep breath. At least the rest of check in seemed to be going ok. Now he also knew that he could get that single in and went to make Becky’s bed. That completed he was going to get the single to get her checked in; but noticed a lot of noise coming from around rooms two and three. The aunt and Sarah were working up an audience and had developed a bit of a fan club with the mom in room two. It was obvious that they were taking their sweet time. John decided he needed to get them out of here before he left and now it was down to the last 30 minutes if he was going to get home in time to let Corinna get to the conference on time.
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