Off Season

Chapter One

Fifteen months after I took over the executive director position at Miracle Meals Kitchen, I sat my car in the charity’s parking lot on a freezing winter morning. Mid January. Cincinnati, Ohio. Avondale, to be exact, a neighborhood where blight and hopelessness infected almost everything. Across the street from our charity, for example, the city had slated a full block of homes for tear down, but it had never gotten around to doing it. The old, windowless row homes stared at me every morning like geriatric, forgotten members of a once great neighborhood. They always made me sad. Families had once lived their lives in those homes. They’d experienced birthday parties, Christmas dinners, arguments, sorrow, and joy between the brushed brick walls and steep staircases. Now though, those buildings just saw drug deals and homeless desperation.

6:48AM.

I rubbed my hands together. Even with the car’s heat on full blast, I couldn’t get warm. Winter had settled in across the city, and settled in hard. Icicles hung from the gutters of the old church that served as the charity’s headquarters, and the remains of a three-day-old snowstorm clung to the everything else in sight. When I got out of my car, I’d have to worry about falling on black ice. Forecasters said the temperature wouldn’t break 20 degrees.

In short, the perfect day for a media blitz.

After a sip from what remained of my tall Starbucks mocha, I checked my phone for the 45th time since 5AM. We’d never coordinated anything like this before at Miracle Meals, and the thought of screwing this up made my stomach turn. Avondale often made the news for shootings, violence, and police foot chases. The Cincinnati neighborhood I had devoted my working life to almost never got any positive publicity, and, up until early January, no local journalist had ever written about Miracle Meals Kitchen.

But then Harrison Shaw screwed up for the third time. No, he didn’t just screw up. He catapulted into failure, smacking into it with the force of an oncoming car.One disaster day in his career put Miracle Meals on a collision course with him.

We weren’t prepared. Every cell in my 29-year-old body knew it.

I shut my eyes and shook my head. I’d power thought it. I had to; we had to. Miracle Meals needed this, so I wouldn’t allow the nervous that danced in my stomach to shake through the rest of my body. Too much pressure. Instead, I’d just treat the next eight hours as a normal day at the office, as if this kind of thing happened more days than not. If I did that, I might be able to get through it, and I might be able to get the staff through it.

Maybe.

Satisfied that I hadn’t missed any last minute emails full of dramatic changes, I grabbed my purse, got out of my Honda Accord, slammed the door shut, and walked in the back entrance to Miracle Meals. The route through the converted church took me past the kitchen and into what once acted as the church’s worship space. From there, a small staircase led me to the second floor and the choir loft that I used as an office. Some beat up castoffs from my uncle’s law office, an ancient orange couch from my grandmother’s basement, and a few vintage posters of food and wine from the 1930s gave the place a passable flair.

I threw my purse on the desk and woke up my computer as my head spun with needless details. Had we cleaned the kitchen enough? Did we have enough refreshments for the media? Did my shirt have any wrinkles? Would the staff arrive on time? By the time I sank into the chair in front of my desktop, I had a running list of things that we had forgotten. No amount of coffee would take the edge away.

At least I could find plenty of things to keep me occupied. Paperwork. Schedules. Professional begging.Donor outreach. Vance writing. Emails. More paperwork. We had no shortage of needs at Miracle Meals, and most days I wondered if we’d ever find a way to meet even half of them.

“Miss Allison?” said a voice somewhere behind me around 11AM, moments after I hung up my phone call to Lloyd Smith Textiles, a conversation that had me begging for a quarterly donation to fund new year expenses. They’d declined; I hadn’t been able to twist even the smallest of commitments from them. That meant I’d have to put more pressure on Miracle Meals’s three other large donors. I dreaded those phone calls, too.

Rubbing my neck, I spun around in my chair and faced Robert, the charity’s part-time grounds keeper and janitor. He leaned against the entrance to the office. In an effort to charm him, I pasted a smile on my face. “Yes?”

“What time is he coming?” Robert had his hands shoved in his pockets and wide eyes.

“2:00.”

Robert cleared his throat, then pulled his right hand out of his pocket and picked at his fingernails. “That might be enough time.”

“Enough time for what?”

We’d taken on too much. I knew that. My stomach constricted and twisted, as if my insides wanted to punch me for ever allowing this media stunt to go through. I might have been executive director of the place, but I had less than five years of real-world experience when it came to nonprofits. Classes at Northwestern University hadn’t prepared me for the daily drama of running a place like Miracle Meals. I just didn’t know what I was doing.

“What,” I said, more a statement than a question as I tired to dissect the look on Robert’s face. “What’s wrong?”My eyes narrowed when he didn’t answer me. Whatever Robert wanted to conceal, it was big. “I’m not blind. I can see that it’s something.”

“Well, yes, it’s not good.” Robert picked at his fingernail once more, still avoiding my gaze. “I was just going over everything in the kitchen, and the washer doesn’t want to work. It won’t run.”

“What do you mean it won’t run?”

“It won’t work. Won’t even turn on.”

“Yes, I get that.” I stood up from my chair. “But are you serious? You’re not, right? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

He stepped aside to let me pass him and head down the stairs to the kitchen.Not that I found anything different than what Robert said. The industrial sized dishwasher we paid for with scraped together donations wouldn’t start no matter how much I tried, and even after I kicked it.

Perfect.

“We need to call the Maytag repairman,” Robert said, trying to crack a joke when he saw me throw up my hands in disgust.

I humored him with a weak smile before I opened up the washer again. This was the last thing, the very last thing, that we needed. “At least we don’t have much in there.”

“We have enough. It’s full.”

I sighed. “We’ll have to hand wash the pots, at least, since we’re going to need them.”

“What is Jessica making today?”

“Ham stratta, steamed vegetables, lentil soup,” I said as I moved over to the large three tub sink, “sliced apples, and miniature toffee bundt cakes for dessert.” I flipped on the water and let out another long breath. “What time is it?”

“Just about 11:10.” Robert pulled the first round of pots out of the dishwasher.

“Good,” I said. “More than enough time to have these rinsed off and dried before our guests arrive.”

Robert gave me a look. One eyebrow cocked and his lips pursed. I could tell that,just like me, he wondered if we should have said no back when the original phone call came. If we’d said no, we’d still be a struggling charity with almost no hope of survival into the new year. But, at least, we’d be a lot less stressed.

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