Hannah
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
The homeless shelter in Adrian has a new director, the exact kind of person the Nonprofit Industrial Complex tends to promote. Nonprofits tend to like directors who pivot to charity work after failing to excel in for-profit business, and they like people with military records, people with police connections, respectable people who the donors can get excited about.
She’s the enemy, Robby says on the walk from my mother’s house to his parents' house. She’s married to a fucking prosecutor! The best-case scenario is that she’ll see the guests as subordinates. Worst-case scenario, she’ll see them as actual fucking enemies.
The new director hasn’t had time to live up to all of Robby’s expectations, but I think he’s probably right. I’ve worked at a lot of nonprofits and they’ve always been suborned just like this—boards invariably hire some ill-suited résumé-polisher, someone who’d look good receiving an award from the Chamber or United Way or whomever, someone to soak up the glow from everyone else’s labor.
At Adrian’s shelter, that labor mostly belongs to Hannah. The only paid employee besides the new director, Hannah works 9-5 every weekday, sleeps with her phone by her bedside 24/7 so she can respond to any off-shift emergency. The two times Robby had to call her, she answered in two rings, alert as though she’d never heard of sleep. Hannah knows the name of every guest at the shelter; she knows the names of their parents and their kids; she knows where they work, where they’re trying to work.
The new director hasn’t met them. It’s unclear whether she’s said as much as a word to any person experiencing homelessness since she started cashing her checks.
They should have just promoted Hannah, Robby tells me, but I say something about how people like Hannah never get to run things. That’s not true—people like Hannah are always running things, they just never get the credit.
We’re past Main and under the leaves now on the Trestle Trail, and Robby and I are stopped by a man with a bicycle. He’s on the side of the newly-paved walkway; he wears basketball shorts and a floppy hat and the handlebars of his bicycle are taped on to the frame.
Is that Kevin? the man says to me. I shake my head, and disappoint him. I’m sorry, you look like my buddy, Kevin. I saw you guys coming down the trail and I thought you were going to fuck me up—you looked like some tough motherfuckers from far away.
But not up close? I say. He shakes his head, and disappoints me.
The handlebars have come off his bike, and he’s tried to tape them back on with fluorescent duct tape. He’s going to walk it to Winter Street where his uncle can be counted on to fix it up. He’s got a few sets of clothes in a plastic bag, dangling by its stretched-out handles from the seat. In another bag he’s got toiletries, and he applies a little deodorant while we talk. I have no idea how old he is.
He’d be a better director than what’s-her-name, Robby says. I think he’s probably right. Two riders with skintight racing suits and helmets and new bikes pass us, On your left!, and disappear up the flat trail in the direction of Wendy’s. Our friend is still behind us, on the edge of the path, trying to load up the bike.
I leave Robby and go to a convenience store east of Division. I kind of recognize the cashier from high school, but maybe I just recognize her from here.
She’s working alone and running two registers at once. At her left-hand register there are three children, probably between eight and twelve, sweat-soaked and dirty from having the kind of summer you’re supposed to have at that age. They’re ordering Buffalo wings from beneath the heat-lamp, and the fried logs of meat called Tornadoes which spin on the hot rack beside the hotdogs. With one hand, the woman sets a cardboard boat of wings and two paper-wrapped Tornadoes on the counter, by the boys’ Brisk Iced Teas. At her right-hand register, a daughter (maybe fifty years old) and her mother (maybe seventy but I never know how old anybody is) are trying to buy more minutes for the mother’s Tracfone.
She doesn’t know how to put more minutes on, says the daughter to the cashier, translating for the mother who maybe doesn’t speak English, or maybe doesn’t speak any language above a whisper.
Follow the instructions on the receipt, there’s a code, you have to call them to activate it.
The daughter holds the receipt in front of her mother, and says, she can’t read that.
The cashier takes it back, and copies the code in big letters on the back of the receipt with a ballpoint pen. And you call this number, the cashier says, marking the phone number with a highlighter. Do you want me to do it?
At this point, I’m at the head of a line of four people, but nobody minds the wait. The cashier calls Tracfone while she rings up the kids’ meal. They have a ten-dollar bill, and the total comes to eleven and change. The cashier takes the ten and puts it in the register, and the kids leave with all the food on the counter.
When it’s my turn, I try and tell the cashier that I think she’s a good person. I think it’s a shame that the Hannahs and the cashiers of the world, who work so hard and do all the work that needs doing, toil in obscurity while a class of other people—the nonprofit executives and the convenience-store franchisees—never dirty their hands or reckon with the world they shape for others to move through.
Don’t tell anyone I’m a good person. She makes me promise. Or people will start expecting something.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer and editor from Adrian, Michigan. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is the 2020 Swan Quill & Lantern Lit Society Writer in Residence. He has a 2006 Pontiac Vibe with 250,000 miles on it, and there’s a highway curling just like smoke above his shoulder.
