When I read the yellow notice stapled to the large front door—essentially announcing the center was closed and now owned by the bank—my smile dimmed. One of the few businesses in this part of town, in this entire city, that had made and could have continued to make a significant impact in the lives of so many had been forced to close its doors because it could no longer afford to pay the monthly expenses.
Where were the wealthy families who wrote checks at fundraisers and auctions like dropping a hundred grand for a non-profit that donated wool sweaters to homeless dogs in India was no bigger thing than walking into a gas station and buying a Coke? Where were the wealthy people who reached the end of the year and realized they needed to give such-and-such dollar amount away to charity for tax benefits? Where were they?
I didn’t need to ask Boone how much it had cost him to run this place to know it hadn’t taken much. Or not much in the scale of the kind of wealth I knew flowed through this city. I wanted to rip that notice off the door and burn it . . . though I knew doing so wouldn’t make a difference. The center was closed. Boone had lost it.
“This is really amazing.” My voice came out as a whisper because I was too choked up to say anything louder.
“Yeah, you said that back in the parking lot.” Boone riffled for something in his back pocket, giving me a peculiar look like he was worried I had a fever. “All you’ve seen is the parking lot and the outside of the building.”
“And it’s all been amazing,” I replied as he stuck a key into the lock. “Didn’t they make you turn over all of your keys?”
Boone wiggled the key a couple of times before turning it and shoving open the door. He smiled. “Sure, they did. And I gave them all to them.” He slid the key out and held it in the air. “Except for this one.”
“Such a rebel.” I passed through the door and waited for him to close it once we were inside. “Who would have guessed you would have owned and run a place like this?”
“No one.” Once he’d closed the door, he left it unlocked. “Not even I would have up until a few years ago.”
“Let me guess—it came to you in a dream?”
He shook his head as he flicked a light switch up and down a few times. The lights stayed off. There was enough light coming through the various windows spread around the old building for us to see clearly, but I didn’t have to check his face to know he was disappointed that where lights had once burned brightly, they now didn’t burn at all.
“It actually came to me in the form of my sister stumbling into my place late one night, boozed up, bruised, and bloodied.”
“Oh my God. What happened to her?” I knew that his younger sister, Wren, had been drinking alcohol for as long as she’d been drinking apple juice, but the bruised and bloodied thing hadn’t been such a regular occurrence back then.
Boone had to work his jaw loose before he could reply. “Her boyfriend. That’s what happened to her.”
I touched his arm. “He beat her?”
Boone looked around the hallway, inspecting everything that wasn’t anywhere close to my direction. “He beat her. He’d been beating her. Just like most of our mom’s boyfriends had beaten Mom” He shook his head. “It was like I was watching my kid sister become my mom. Making the same mistakes. One bad decision at a time, paving her way into a living hell with her own hands.”
I wanted to squeeze his hand or give him a hug or give him something to indicate his pain was evident and I was acknowledging it. My feet seemed glued to the floor though. “And seeing your sister like that made you think of creating this place?”
He turned his back to me and shook his head. “No, not so much what had happened to her that night, but what had happened to her before to drive her to a place where dancing for dollars and dating guys who dealt with problems with their fists was all she expected out of life.”
My back stiffened when he looked at me over his shoulder. I knew what he was getting at. “You mean what happened to her when you were kids?” I had to pause before I could say anything else. “Her . . . abuse?”
Boone didn’t answer, and when he finally did, it was with a single nod.
“You thought that if Wren had had a place like this, as a sort of refuge, she could have been saved from what happened to her?” The ceilings were high out here in the hall, making my voice echo around us, but the words I was saying I wanted to keep quiet.