14A

I followed her to her apartment, holding her elbow for added support as she bravely ascended the stairs with her cane. She proudly donned bright purple fuzzy socks and no shoes. I pointed out the oil spots in the parking lot to watch out for, telling her how much I used to get in trouble for running through the oil spots and tracking it into my momma's car. She was barely 50, but the stroke disabled this once agile woman. She was once mother, wife, provider, and pillar of her community, but her children have left her, her husband is in jail, the small apartment she lives in is provided by government funds, and the community has run her down. Just outside her door, a man in his mid-twenties demanded his money from a teenage boy for some sort of drugs he was dealing. She stopped and eyed them angrily. I shuffled her and myself around them into the faux-safety of her apartment.

Betty is her name. She says, "Oh Lawd!" when things are good or bad or just cause she wants to say it. Her apartment is stuffy and looks as though a disabled person tries to keep it clean - the floor unswept, unwashed dishes piled up, that sort of thing. A hover-round sits unused in the hallway, the sign of an unarmed fight for a fading sense of independence. The largest velvet portrait of a black Jesus I have ever seen hangs beside the door, looking down at me with a sad understanding, as if to say “you can't even begin to understand this kind of sorrow, but I do.”

I leave the bag of food I brought from the ministry I've come with on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Her fridge, cluttered with half-eaten meals from over the past two weeks, puts off a less-than-appetizing smell due to the less-than-appetizing expired leftovers. I rejoin Betty in the living room and we joke and talk about her kids, her husband, and her loneliness here on her own. When she talks about “her Jesus” and how good He is, she points to the sad-eyed velvet black Jesus hanging on her wall, raising her hands and I find myself saying doing the same as she testifies to the goodness of Jesus. No, He's not made to look like we want Him to look. But He understands.

“I'll see you next week,” I say as I slam the door shut because it's broken and simply pulling it closed won't keep it that way. And I will. Because nothing says “I care” more than coming back again and again and again. And because I simply have to have more of the kind of hope she has.