My lovely, brilliant, kind-hearted wife has a reputation for bringing home strays.  That’s how I came to be there in the first place.  This is an attribute that I love about her.  We have given homes, both temporary and permanent, to a veritable menagerie of cats, dogs, a horse, a hawk, bees (yes, bees), birds, lizards, snakes and teenagers.  She won’t even allow me to kill the spiders that make their way into our house with the sole purpose of biting me. But, her (our) latest stray project has me a little miffed and I feel bad about it.

There is a young couple.  He is just out of the military after a tour in Iraq.  She is very young.  I’m thinking nineteen at the most. I didn’t ask.  They have a nine-month-old son.  The baby stays with the girl’s parents about seventy miles from here.  The couple has recently become homeless.

How we came to know these people is something I probably ought not to go into, as there are some legal issues that I may compromise by doing so.  Perhaps I'll just say that, for the most part, they are strangers to us.  In fact, I hadn’t met them until last Friday evening. But, it was his tears and his lamenting that he was struggling to take care of his family that broke my wife’s heart and prompted her to call and ask my opinion about anything we could do to help these people.

Their story, as best I can make out, is that they were evicted from the home they were sharing with a friend of his and lost his job on the same day.  Poof!!... Instant homelessness.

Upon meeting the couple, I was struck immediately by the size and apparent strength of the young man and the youth and naïveté of the woman.  He is about six-two, red headed and looks like he could play linebacker for the Bears.  She is tiny with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and of mixed race.

I own a small travel trailer that no one has really used in several years.  The use of the trailer was offered to them with the caveat that they clean it out and make it habitable.

They arrived Friday evening and he and I hooked the trailer up to the back of my truck and after airing up the tires pulled it from behind my barn to a more workable area.  Upon inspection of the trailer, it was apparent that it would take more than a few hours of work to make the trailer fit to sleep in. 

My wife had prepared dinner while the young man and I worked on the trailer and over the meal, we offered them an air mattress on the living room floor for the night. 

My house is small, very small.  Only about nine hundred and fifty square feet with only one bathroom. I am currently in the process of building another bathroom and a laundry room so there is something of a mess taking up more of the tiny house than normal.

Nevertheless, they accepted the invitation of the air mattress and as we talked over dinner, I became less and less enamored of the idea of taking these people under our wing.

I was rather blunt with them as I asked why she wasn’t staying at her parent’s home with her baby.  He was polite but a bit of a braggart, saying he could do most anything such as plumbing, framing, electrical, but when pressed slightly on the subjects he appeared to know less than I do about all of these subjects.  Still, he is big and able bodied, he should have some kind of job in no time.  Tomorrow they would get back on the trailer and surely will have it completed before the light gave out.  Oh, but wait.  That’s right, he remembered; she has a training she must attend for her new job at a major electronic retailer.  They need to leave early.  As I knew she could drive, I thought about asking why he felt he needed to accompany her but I didn’t.  Oh, and by the way, could they borrow a few dollars for gas?  Dude, you drive an enormous pick up truck.  A few bucks won’t even get you out of the driveway. 

After breakfast and forty more dollars, they left. I assumed his plan was to be back fairly early in the day to work on the trailer and then go back into town to pick her up later.

As the next morning unfolded and the hour grew later and he never came back, I became still more ill at ease about our new “friends.”  He had talked about his big plans.  A friend of his wanted him to open a branch of the friend’s security business in this area.  He was just waiting on a call.  His old boss would probably need him back any minute now, as he didn’t think the boss could get along without him.  He was just waiting on a call.  He might just open a security business of his own.  He was just waiting on clearing up that pesky legal issue.

These people just seemed so young, so unprepared, so immature and, excuse the expression, so stupid.  This girl really needed to go back home. She really seems to need some mothering and to do some mothering herself.   If he needed to be near her he really needed to go with her and take whatever type of work he could get.

Around four, that afternoon, they called.  They had something they needed to do in Houston and they’d see us tomorrow.  Okay, really? The only place you have to live is in desperate need of cleaning and y’all are going to Houston.  Whatever. 

They did come back Sunday, but not until a little after noon.  He needed help leveling and setting up the trailer so I abandoned my San Diego Chargers and went out to help.  Another meal and a couple hours later, still no cleaning of the inside of the trailer had occurred.  They had to go back to Houston for more training.  On Sunday night? Yep.

Oh, and by the way the truck is running low on gas and he’d be able to pay me back soon. So, would it be all right if he borrowed another couple of bucks. “Sure,” I said, biting my lip.  I wanted to say, “A couple is two.  You really want to borrow twenty couples of dollars.”  I didn’t.

My wife and I talked.  “Look, they’re not making any effort to clean out the trailer.  I can’t really blame them, as the task looks daunting.  Still, I’m not really willing to give up my living room for an extended and indefinite period.  How’d my Chargers do?”

We didn’t hear from them again until Wednesday morning.  They called my wife. Could they stay the night and then get on cleaning out the trailer tomorrow.  My wife called me.

She and I came to the decision that we couldn’t really be held hostage in this way.  Being held hostage sounds severe and I don’t think that this was our new “friends” intention.  Still, this is how we felt.  We came up with an alternative plan.

Wednesday after work, I met him at a motel near the edge of town.  I gave him some leads on people I had approached regarding his potential employment.  I gave him another forty dollars and booked them a room at the motel for a week.  Along with that, I gave him my best advice. He accepted all these things graciously.

Finally, I told him that I had done all I could for them and that he needed to get his shit together.  He agreed with my assessment as we shook hands and parted company.

I don’t know what will become of these people.  I urged them to go back to where her parents are.  I urged him to take any work he could find until he found what he wanted.  I implored him not to allow that little girl to sleep in the truck another single night. 

We will, no doubt, help these folks if they call again, but I won’t bring them back into the house. I will help them get back to her parents home.  I will feed them.  What I won’t do is make their plight my priority again. He is an adult even if she is only barely one.  He has been in the service and served in Iraq.  He should know how to take care of himself.  He should have some sense of how to survive. 

I suppose this whole post is a way to assuage my guilt over cutting them loose.  I feel somehow lessened.  I am not proud of me for sending them on their way.  Could I have done more?  Should I have done more?  I don’t know, but I didn’t.

Forgive me, OS for I have sinned.