A Sweetheart for the Single Dad

“I appreciate that,” she said, curious about exactly what the joke might be. But she was here for business not for pleasure, so she opted to get to it. “Where do we start?” she asked enthusiastically.

“This way,” he said, pointing with that dimpled chin of his to the street that ran in front of the center and heading there.

“This is the park we’ll be cleaning up—right next door,” he informed her as they took a left turn onto the sidewalk. “City resources are going into an upscale version near your store on the other side of town and this one has been left to rot.”

“It definitely needs work,” Lindie commented as she took in the sight of rundown, damaged picnic tables and play equipment, of trees that needed trimming, of the signs of overall neglect.

Beyond the park they began to go up and down streets lined with small frame houses, heading for front doors to leave the fliers he was carrying.

While Lindie could see that it had been a nice middle-class area once upon a time, now there were only a few houses that were well-kept. More often than not yards were either overtaken by weeds or totally bare. When it came to the houses themselves, too many had chipped and peeling paint or siding, missing shutters and shingles or other signs of disrepair.

“It costs money to water lawns. To fertilize grass and flowers and to kill weeds. To paint and fix things when they age or weather takes a toll,” Sawyer said when he noticed her avoiding the brown branches of a dead hedge to one side of a small porch. “And it takes time that a lot of people had when it was a ten-minute drive to and from work, but don’t have now that it’s an hour or more commute every day.”

Lindie didn’t comment, especially when they passed a house that was obviously vacant and had a foreclosure notice in the front window. But she did feel the weight on her conscience and in response she picked up some toys dropped in the yard of the next house and left them neatly stacked at the door as Sawyer slid the flyer into a grate on a screen torn away from the frame.

There was an elderly man working on the engine of an equally elderly truck at the next house. Sawyer said hello and approached him with the fliers.

“Think you could hold this for me for a minute?” the elderly man asked.

Sawyer passed the fliers to Lindie so he could assist with something in the engine. As she stood there waiting it occurred to her that all of the vehicles parked in driveways and at the curbs were dated. That there wasn’t a new car anywhere to be seen.

“Okay, I can take it from here,” the old man said a moment later, handing Sawyer a rag to wipe his hands on and glancing at the flier he accepted from Lindie.

“Glad somebody’s doin’ something with that park,” the man said. “It’s turning into another eyesore around here and we don’t need any more of those.”

“Maybe you can come down and help out,” Sawyer suggested encouragingly.

“Maybe,” the man allowed as Sawyer said they’d let him get back to his work.

He took the fliers from Lindie so they could move on.

Block after block, they encountered more of the same downtrodden homes and people. Several residents either complained about the decay and neglect or wearily committed to helping and voiced their hope that something would improve the area.

Lindie took it all in, continuing her own minor aid by picking up a bicycle or a newspaper here and there to bring up to the house it belonged to, by righting an overturned lawn chair, by doing whatever small thing she could when she encountered it.

Fences were also casualties at many houses and a humorously ferocious Yorkshire terrier leashed to a post let them know he would rather have been free to run around the yard that could no longer contain him—or at least that was Sawyer’s interpretation of the yipping that greeted them.

Worse than the houses whose owners were clearly having trouble maintaining them was the small shopping center they came to late in the evening. Darkness was just beginning to fall and they’d come almost full circle when Sawyer stopped to point it out.

The shopping center was downhill from where they stood so they could look out over the entire area. There were four buildings with multiple storefronts in each one, all of them vacant. Windows were broken in or boarded up. Graffiti, litter, cracked pavement and the signs of general decay made the whole thing an ugly blot on the landscape. Worse, it was a gathering spot for some unsavory-looking teenagers currently loitering there.

“This place is the most direct result of your store,” Sawyer said. “Before there was a Camden Superstore there were tenants in every one of those storefronts. Now they’ve all gone broke or moved. We’ve requested that the Urban Renewal Authority come in and make it a revitalization project but so far they haven’t agreed and this is what the area is left with.”

There was no denying how bad it was, so Lindie didn’t try. And despite the guilt she felt, she said, “It isn’t our goal to do damage to any community. We always go into an area conscientiously and we do everything we can not to cause problems. We make offers to small businesses to buy them out but if they refuse and then can’t compete and go broke, or if they accept and the buildings that housed them get abandoned—”

“It ends up like this,” he concluded, not letting her off the hook. “And it lowers the value of every piece of property around it.”

“We can’t go in and buy every house that might decrease in value because another part of town booms and theirs busts,” she argued. But even though she knew the words were true, they didn’t make her feel any less terrible about what she was seeing tonight.

“No. But, for instance, you could have bought those buildings down there and offered the businesses in them rents reduced enough to let them survive. You could have introduced a program to bring in businesses and shops that offered products or services that didn’t have to compete with Camden Superstores. You could have offered existing business owners other avenues—retraining or something that kept their doors open somehow. That kept this area alive. Instead it’s just decimated and all because of you.”

“Those are suggestions I can make! Things I can push for in the future—”

“Uh-huh. And maybe you’ll come through. Or maybe, if you shut me up, you don’t have to bother. That is why I’ll never take you on as a client. It’s why I won’t stop warning communities that this is what can happen when you come in. Why not only won’t I stop trying to protect areas and residents from the residual havoc you wreak but why I sure as hell won’t work for you and end up a part of the problem!”

“If you worked for us maybe you could be the one to push us to take your suggestions.”

“Sure,” he said, his tone making it clear he wasn’t buying that for a minute.

Lindie didn’t give up. “Maybe you could keep on top of the problems when they develop, before they get to this point, and bring them to our attention.”

“Oh, very slick,” he said as they moved on, returning to the community center parking lot. “And once I’m on your payroll it would mean my job if I made a stink and refused to spout the company line. Again—not a chance,” he repeated as they reached the driver’s side of her car and stopped.

“Did this all come from my uncle winning my aunt from your father?” Lindie asked, feeling frustrated with his hardline stance.

“Winning implies a fair fight,” he said, arching an eyebrow as he leaned against the side of his SUV, settling in to focus on her. “Camdens don’t fight fair.”

“But we do!”

He ignored that claim and instead answered her question. “No, this doesn’t all come from what went on between my father and your uncle. It started there—certainly I grew up hearing that story more than once. Then there were a couple of things that added to it.”

“Like what?”

“Like the Camden Superstore that went into Dunhaven when I was in middle school. My dad was in construction. He worked all over and he’d seen what happened in the wake of your stores. He knew what we were in for. So by the time I was ready to go to high school my folks decided they’d better sell the house I’d grown up in and get out while the getting was good.”

“Part of Dunhaven ended up like this side of Wheatley?”

“Yeah, it did,” he said as if wondering how she could not know that.

“So you and your parents—”

“And my younger brother, moved,” he went on. “My parents had to take a loss on the house to sell it. I ended up having to enter a different school district and leave behind all my friends.”

“That didn’t make you happy,” Lindie commented, interpreting his tone.

“No, that did not make me happy. And when I went back to visit those friends I saw this.” He motioned to what she’d now had her eyes opened to.

“The last time I went back—for a Friday-night visit in the summer,” he continued, “my old friends were bashing in windows for entertainment. The movie theater had closed. They didn’t have anything else to do. The building they were vandalizing was a tire store in an area of town that had been doing okay when I moved. But thanks to Camden Superstore’s automotive department it had eventually gone under and so had my friend’s father—he’d managed it. My friend had a lot of pent-up anger about it and that was how he let it out. It was the last time my parents let me go back to visit, but I heard over the transom that that particular friend kept to that path. He got into more and more trouble and ended up in jail.”

“And you blame us,” Lindie attested.

“I can tell you firsthand that he wasn’t on the road to prison before your store came in and ruined his old man...” He left the rest of the answer to her.

“Then, in college, H. J. Camden came up in a couple of my business courses,” Sawyer went on. “I’ll grant you that it wasn’t always negative—he is quite a success story and more than one of my business professors admired the hell out of him. But he also came up on a list of modern-day robber barons.”

Lindie had heard that title applied to her great-grandfather before but it still caused her to flinch. “And that was what you paid attention to,” she concluded.

“Like I said, I grew up on the story of a Camden’s ruthlessness. So, yeah, I paid a lot of attention to that side of things.”