Chapter 16

I got an unexpected phone call from my Aunt Clara, telling me that she had just learned that Mother Superior had cancer in some of her internal organs, her stomach, liver, and pancreas, and that she was being relieved of her duties by the church hierarchy. Aunt Clara said this was being done in order to allow Mother Superior to spend her final days in prayer, and in quiet contemplation and anticipation of the after life.

I heard the news, and it filled me with more sadness than I would have expected. Mother Superior had been one of the few constants in my life at the orphanage. We never agreed on much, but, because we both stayed just inside the area of the others limited tolerance, we had somehow managed to co-exist together for an amazingly long time. I called her from the office the next morning, but one of the sisters told me she had been taken, by ambulance, to a Catholic hospital.

I remembered that Mother Superior had always professed a love for the smell of live gardenia's. With Joyce's help, I managed to track down the address of the hospital where Mother Superior was taken, and to locate a source of live, blooming, gardenia plants. I had four of the plants delivered to her room, specifying that each plant have at least four of the fragment flowers in full bloom at the time of delivery. I sent a card by separate courier, thanking her for teaching me the difference between duty and pleasure, and for showing me the pleasure of doing a good job for its own sake. I signed the card, Kenny Masters, because this was the name she had always known me as.

All of the nuns at the orphanage were waiting to see who would be selected as the replacement, to be the new Mother Superior. I hoped, for all the orphan kids sake, that it would be someone who was warmer, and more loving, than the woman she would be replacing.

It was two weeks later before word began trickling down that the order had decided to close the orphanage down. The plan was for most of the youngest children to be transferred to another Catholic orphanage, one being run by a different order of Catholic sisters. Most of the remainder of the orphans, all of these the older boys, would be placed in temporary emergency shelters contracted by the various County social services agencies. The boys were all being returned back to their County of initial placement. These agencies were told they needed to make other, permanent, living arrangements for the boys. This sudden, unannounced, totally unexpected closure of St. Cecelia's created an immediate strain on the existing emergency sheltering resources of most of these agencies

All of us found out about the closure only after all the final decisions had been made by the Church. At first, I was very upset that the little security those boys had in their lives was being taken away from them. That upset feeling didn't last too long though, because I started investigating alternative living options, hoping to find something that I could do to help lessen the disruption to the lives of the older boys transferred away from St. Cecelia's.

One thing I could do was to see that Marie was going to be okay. I went over to St. Cecelia's, and, as she and I got the serving line ready for lunch, we talked about her future plans. I knew that Marie was married, and that she and her husband lived alone now. They had raised two children, but one of them had died in late childhood, of some illness. The other one was married, and she lived somewhere in Nebraska. I knew that Marie's husband was disabled, and that he lived on his social security disability payments. Marie wasn't someone who was easily upset or excitable. She told me she was going to go out and get another job, maybe at a restaurant. She told me there was always plenty of work for a cook. The only worry she had, she said, was people thinking she was too old to hire. I was surprised when Marie told me she was sixty one. I thought she was younger. Her hair didn't have any gray in it at all.

"Marie, you can come work at my Dad's company. We'll make you a baker. You can make bread or rolls, whatever you feel like making."

"Kenny, I'm a cook. I like to cook. I like seeing people eating what I cooked for them. Don't worry, I'll be okay. Some restaurant will give me work."

"Why not open your own restaurant, Marie?"

"Where I'm getting the money to have my own restaurant? When I was young, maybe, but I'm too old now to run a restaurant. It's better if I just cook. Let someone else have the other responsibility."

"What kind of food would you cook if you had your own restaurant?"

"Latin food, arroz con pollo, tacos, burritos, enchiladas, soups and salads. Healthy food, but most of the restaurants like this, the family members, they do all the cooking."

"Marie, if I get somebody to hire you to cook for that kind of restaurant, will you come to work there?"

"You know of such a restaurant, one that needs a cook, and would hire Marie?"

"I know someone who could run a restaurant, but she can't cook. Maybe you two could be partners. Let me talk to her, and see if she's interested or not. Give me your address and phone number. I'll talk to her, either today or tomorrow, and let you know. Don't take another job until you hear from me, okay?" Marie just smiled at me. I was pretty sure she thought I was just talking, but I had an idea.

Grace and Jane were working at the golf academy, and Mama was worried about Grace. Jane really enjoyed her classes at the college, but Grace even though her grades were good, was struggling with hers. She was only going to college because Jane was, and she really had no interest in any of her courses. She had told Mama she didn't plan to register for the next semester, and had been feeling Mama out about coming to work at the academy full time, while Jane went back to school in the fall. Mama's dilemma was that she really didn't need anyone from fall until late spring.

I was sure, with her outgoing personality, that Grace would do well running a restaurant. I knew, from my father that restaurants were difficult to make profitable. Our companies didn't sell directly to restaurants, only to larger distributors that sold to them. Too many went under, and didn't pay their bills.

I didn't worry too much about whether Grace and Marie could run a profitable operation. I thought it would be fun to find out if they could get along together though. Marie was solid and quiet, but she took no nonsense from anybody. I had seen her yelling at suppliers to the orphanage when they had tried to give her a short count, or tried dumping inferior ingredients on her. Grace wasn't anyone's idea of a pushover either. With all the knives Marie kept sharpened in her kitchen, I figured it would be a pretty even fight if those two ever got into it.

During my investigation into living alternatives for the displaced boys at St. Cecelia's, I kept hearing the phrase 'group homes', and, after learning a little about what they were, I went to my parents and we started putting together a team to help us start putting a few of them together for the boys.

A group home is a state and county licensed facility, one that is permitted to provide shelter for up to six individuals in addition to any staff in attendance. Most group homes have a not for profit tax status, which allows them to solicit in the private sector for tax deductible contributions. There were group homes for developmentally disabled adults, and there were others, ones that were just for children. The overwhelming majority of the group homes were for children, but they all specialized in helping only those children with specific disabilities. The most common of these being mental retardation. The next most popular category of group homes were those set up to care for children who were either emotionally disturbed, or displayed delinquent behavior.

Some of these group homes, particularly in California, even housed children in a co-educational setting. Usually permits were issued for a single family dwelling, with no more than six children being allowed to a home. Two licensed adults, usually a married couple, also lived in the home, and provided primary supervision for the children. It was a form of an institution that was deliberately designed to be much more like a regular family setting than an orphanage could ever hope to be. The group home "Parents" were chosen as much for their nurturing nature as for any other characteristics. These were like families, as much as it was possible to be.

You didn't need to meet any qualifications, other than some financial stability, in order to be able to own group homes. To get one licensed though, you had to have people working in them that had passed relatively stringent background checks. To own more than one group home, you needed to have people working for you that had met certain educational requirements, and had degrees in some of the more specific social sciences. They didn't have to show any other competence, just the required degree.

It took my father, mother, and a team composed of several lawyers, less than a month to put all the necessary paperwork together, and then, a not for profit corporation, named Kansas Communities for Children, was born. We began with licenses for operating four homes, all of them four bedroom residences that my father had purchased from a bank that had taken them when they foreclosed on a builder whose loan was in default. The homes were all situated together, two on each side of a quiet cul de sac in Bolling. Each home had a six foot high block wall fence surrounding the back yard, and had passed various fire and health inspections, prior to its being approved for use as a licensed group home.

Part of the initial licensing requirement was that none of the close neighbors to a group home objected when the use permit application was in front of the zoning authorities, prior to the state license being issued. We made sure that this was the case by buying into this development, where our homes were the only ones the builder had completed before running into financial problems. Later, the bank was able to sell off the rest of the builder's assets, and the rest of the subdivision was built. By then though, we were already licensed and operating, and were no longer subject to needing neighborhood approval.

Joyce and I interviewed more than fifty applicants for the executive director's position, before finally settling on a woman from California. We chose her primarily because she had previously opened up, and operated her own group homes for disturbed children in Santa Barbara, California. We assumed that all of her experience would be invaluable to us, and we were right. Once we settled on her, we left all the other staffing responsibilities in her hands. In another month, we were fully staffed, with our executive director traveling around, negotiating with county social workers for their children to be placed in one of our homes.

Since the children we were seeking to care for weren't retarded, diseased, disturbed, or delinquent, the money to provide for their support and upkeep was minimal. That might not have been fair, but that's how it was. If you wanted to provide good care for children, you were better off taking kids with physical or emotional problems. The others, they fell into a category where the money paid to care for them wasn't adequate to meet their needs, other than the most basic needs of physical survival. In one way, this was a good thing for us, because it meant we'd get to pick and choose the children we wanted to provide care for.

We had given Sandy, our executive director, some very precise and specific instructions about the age range and status of the children we were looking to put in our homes. We specified that they be boys, aged between ten and fifteen years, and true orphans. They had to have spent a minimum time, three years or more, in long term institutional care, either orphanages or hospitals. I wanted boys who had known and lived in pretty much the same lifestyle as I had experienced. I knew these boys would appreciate what we were going to be providing for them.

We had some trouble at first with Sandy, because she had her own favorite age group of children, ones that she enjoyed working with the most. These were the younger children, ranging from four to eight years of age. Every week, she would just seem to happen across one or more of these children, and, in the process, she'd end up falling in love with them. She would then come to me, and desperately plead that they were a special case, asking that an exemption be given for them being allowed admission into one of our homes.

Every week I'd be forced to turn her down. I kept telling her, over and over again, that these weren't the children that I was targeting for assistance. Finally, when I couldn't stand to listen to any more of her emotional pleas, I told her that she either had to accept the limits I'd placed on her, as far as what our desired resident population was, or else she could go out and use her own money to set up other group homes, ones that catered to the age group of children she so desperately wanted to work with. Because she no longer had the money to do that herself, she agreed to stop trying to bring her special cases to us.

She was a great administrator, extremely good with the children, and with working closely with the staff she'd hired to care for all of the children. She was a very loving and nurturing woman, but we were running these homes for our purposes, not for hers. I had made a promise to myself when Uncle Bunny died, and keeping it was the main focus of my attention.

It didn't take long for us to fill up to our full capacity. All of our children were being enrolled in the public school system. Part of our screening process involved making sure that the children we selected were capable of doing well in their studies. It might sound cruel and unfeeling, but I knew we had to expend our limited resources on the children who could benefit the most from our intervention in their lives. We needed children who had the mental capability to capitalize on an opportunity.

We were paid a negotiated monthly rate by each county for taking care of their children. That fee took care of all of our most basic costs. Mama and I added whatever money was needed for the frills and extras. My goal was to get each of these children living in a real family home, with their own loving parents, but, while they were waiting for this to take place, I wanted them to enjoy a better standard of living than any of them had previously known. Unfortunately, with the age group and institutional history for the boys I was picking, exceeding their previous standard of living was far too easy an accomplishment.

Later, when I was back in school, it was difficult trying to juggle my school work, while still trying to keep on top of payroll, expenses, income, and all the other financial administration necessary to keep the group homes functioning.

Joyce was taking over my position in the company, and she was going to hire two of her own paid assistants. Joyce was given a salary that was easily the equivalent to one of our shift managers. My father was constantly singing her praises to all who would listen. She was fitting in with us, both in a business and a family sense. I'd never seen Mama happier at the dinner table in the evenings. Each night all of us would report to each other about the content of our days. Mama was still struggling with her depression, but, she and Joyce would spend time together alone in Mama's bedroom, and Mama was preparing Joyce for the time when she would have one of her bad depressions.

Joyce was being an immense help to me also, volunteering with both her time and her creative energy, helping me to get as much financial and services assistance as we could from the federal, state, and county governments. It was she that helped get us a Federal grant to purchase the four homes for our first modular expansion. She and Sandy wrote the grant proposal, but it was Joyce who contacted our congressman, and both our our state's Senators, to ask for their help in seeing that the grant proposal got a favorable hearing. It took less than five months before our request was approved, and for the funds to be made available to us.

We also had Mama canvassing for funds in the private sector too. Mama had turned out to be a tireless fund raiser for us. She knew all of the older and wealthier families living in the area. For years, she had attended, and generously supported their fund raisers. With our group homes project on her mind, she started calling in all those past favors. She even formed a group of ladies, and named them as the guardian angels of the boys. Each of these society matrons drew out the name for one of our boys, and took on the responsibility for remembering their birthdays, and for providing them with gifts at Christmas time.

Still, even with all of that, we were personally supplementing the homes expenses with some of our own money. We were planning on our first expansion, but we wanted to wait for at least a year. In the meantime, Joyce and Sandy located property and started accepting contractor bids to build our four home cluster just outside of Holton. There was going to be a large common green belt area in the center, one that all the boys could use to run around in and play the games that would keep them out in fresh air and help to strengthen their physical conditioning. I had come up with a modular concept system, one that we could use as a model when setting up other four and five home clusters situated throughout the state. It was worth it, the waiting, because we refined our program until we had it set up so all our boys wanted for nothing.

They received the best medical and dental care possible. They each had their own personal clothing allowance of fifty dollars a month. They got personal spending money as well, with the amount based on how helpful they were helping out around the house, and how well they were performing with their school studies.

We placed a lot of emphasis on making sure that each boy learned the living skills to be independent and self sufficient. I had set Joyce the task of planning individual summer camping trips for all of our group homes. She had found an RV dealer who gave us a great price on renting four of his largest, self contained, motor homes, for one month each, during the upcoming summer. Each group home was going to plan two of their own two week tours for somewhere in the continental U. S.

The most difficult hurdle for us to overcome was getting permission from the social workers for our boys to leave the state. We had to go to court several times to secure permissions, after a few of the social workers refused to grant it. The insurance coverage we were forced to carry was super expensive, but a woman in Mama's group, convinced her husband to pay all of the premiums for us.

All of this started going on before the beginning of my senior year in high school. I had opted to become a day student, living at home for my senior year. Keeping up with school work became a challenge for me, because the group homes had first call on my time and energies. Somehow, when I really needed to crack the books and study for an exam, I found the time, and managed to keep up my grade point average.

I sacrificed to do this, giving up a lot of what would have been my free time for social activities, but it was always worth it. If I ever felt too tired, or started to feel like I didn't have the energy to continue on with the schedule I had, a one hour trip to and from the group homes was all I ever needed to restore both my energy and my motivation. I saw the difference in the faces and in their postures. There was a real, noticable difference in the way they carried themselves, they kept their heads up higher, and they were willing to look people right in the eye, they felt they were the equals to all the other people now. I saw happiness and hope, where before there was only disappointment and despair.

I started noticing, sometime in early September, that my thoughts were constantly turning to girls. I was horny. I had taken the required steps for relieving my sexual tension, masturbating several times a week, at least. It wasn't the same as enjoying the real thing.

I had a lot less contact with girls ever since my last phone conversation with Shirley. I had talked with her the Sunday after my meeting Helen, and after the episode with Brenda. Joyce was out of the house, over with Hans, in Bolling, getting her personal keepsakes from her room at her parent's house.

I called Shirley, and the conversation started out on a happy enough note. After we got done with all of our small talk, I told her that I had concluded that we'd both be better off seeing other people. She told me she thought so as well. As soon as she said that though, she asked me if I'd met anyone yet. When she asked me that, I told her that I had, and admitted kissing Helen, and touching her a little as well.

Shirley was upset, although we did continue to talk, and she didn't hang up on me. She even told me she understood my reasoning, but then, she added that she was hurt that I was in such a hurry to explore this willingness to begin seeing other people again.

I knew I had to tell her about the dream, and about the fears I had that I might be becoming someone I didn't want to be.

I started talking about Brenda and Emily, and what I had been trying to negotiate with Brenda. She listened to me, at first, but her comments whenever I paused, were becoming angry attacks at me. To her, it didn't matter that I'd changed my mind before anything physical had actually taken place.

Some continuing relationship with Shirley might still might have been salvageable, if I had just limited myself to that not quite so innocent flirting with Helen at work. Telling her about my attempt at seducing and humiliating Brenda was far more than she could accept, especially with it happening in that one week between our first and second phone calls. I had wanted to confess it all to her, to get it out in the open, so that we could try to find out where we stood, after that.

After awhile, she told me to stop telling her about it, saying she couldn't take any more. I told her that I'd wait for her to think about it more, and then I'd call her on the following Sunday.

I told her I still wanted for us to keep in touch. She warned me then, with the direction it appeared I was moving my life in, she wasn't sure she could even bear to remain my friend. Hearing her say that, I knew the events of the past week had really affected her. To say she might not even want to be friends with me, that was a blow. She told me she'd think about our situation, and she did promise to speak with me again, when I phoned her on the following Sunday. I thought the call had gone pretty much about the way I'd expected it to, with the exception that I never anticipated her wanting to have nothing more to do with me.

I had no new transgressions to report on the following Sunday, but my good behavior went unnoticed and unrewarded. Shirley told me that she had decided it would be less painful for both of us if we made a clean and complete break of it. She asked that we stop communicating with each other for awhile. I asked her to clarify her use of the term "for awhile", but all she would say is she didn't want me to call her anymore, and that she would call me, whenever she was ready to resume being in contact with me.

After we got off the phone, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what it was I'd done. I hadn't acted like I was still in love with Shirley. My behavior hadn't been consistent with someone who had often stated his desire to maintain a close long distance relationship. In my own mind, I could still admit that I loved her. I'd broken the bonds that connected us together. It was an emotional decision, one predicated on my fear that I was going to lose her anyway. I thought my having been the cause of the final severance would lessen the impact of the emotional hurt I was going to suffer.