The PinUp Coffee Shop

Chapter Twenty-Five: Planning

Clary was carrying Jonny in on her arm after she had taken his coat off of him. With the December chill in the air as it approached the snow season, Clary never let him outside without a thick pair of pants and a thick shirt with his coat. She was determined to make sure he got sick as little as possible, especially in the winter.

He was holding his giraffe and his blanket tightly in his hands and was jumping around to be let down. He was still trying to walk so it made him eager to get to the floor, so he could keep trying.

His jumping and squirming made Clary laugh and she took him over to his playroom, hugging him tightly as she thought back on her day. He made all of her pain and doubt worth everything. She would go through all of the pain again if she could keep him safe and with her. She didn't know where she would be without him.

Clary sighed as she set her son down, letting him pick out what he had wanted to play with. She was always a cautious mother, so of course everything in the house was baby proofed. No outlets were left uncovered, all of the doors were locked so that he couldn't open the doors, no fires, glass, or anything small enough that he could swallow or anything that could potentially harm him was close enough for him to reach. She was thinking about putting up the baby gate, but she realized that he would probably want to explore like usual, and that he would be okay because her house was safe for him. Of course, there always were those times when a child would fall, knock his head on something, but not everything was preventable. And that was something that Clary had to learn a long time ago.

She sighed and shook out her head with a smile as she watched her son go for one of his walking toys. He was crawling his way over to a fire truck toy. It had an open back so that Jonny could get in and out of it without any help, but it had the front and the two other sides for him to hold on to. It was made for him to also grow not only leg strength, but arm strength as well as he had to hold himself up. And it had wheels on the bottoms so that he was dragging it across the room, learning how to hold his feet and walk around.

Clary smiled as he started trying to move around on his own and decided to let him play. She shook her head out and left the room to let her son go around on his own, and she walked into the kitchen.

She had just gotten out of her meeting with the contractor that she had set for another project that she was working on. She was in the works of making up a new house for An Ounce of Hope.

A few days after Clary reached out to her old social worker, she had been walking around a farmer's market when she saw the name on a flyer. After quickly buying her groceries, she bolted home and found an exact copy of the flyer in her fax machine. Her old social worker had sent it over just after she had left the house and it said that they were trying to buy the house, and their goal was outrageous given the condition of the house. Clary had done thorough research. But this was her chance to get a meeting with them.

As soon as she got her paperwork together, she had called the woman who was in charge—Madeline—and scheduled a time to come by to talk in person so she could see if she could help. She had asked how many girls were in the home, what ages and so on, as she wanted to know what kind of atmosphere she was going to walk into. She found out that they were mostly teenagers, with a few younger children but all together, there were about fifteen girls living there, and they were also understaffed.

She knew it was delicate, and she knew she didn't want to look like a businesswoman when she met the girls. So, she chose to wear a pair of dark blue jeans and an old black sweater that she had with a pair of boots. She was classy, but not exactly sophisticated. And she had brought down a bunch of homemade food, chicken, roast, casseroles, pies, and ice cream. She wanted to make sure they were getting some healthy food into them, and they were getting desert too. She had found that many of the girls, of course, were wary of her, and she couldn't blame them, she had known exactly what that was like. It was never comforting to know that a stranger was going to walk around the only place that you could call home. Especially a home that someone was trying to rip away from you. Clary knew that better than anyone else.