From the time she was twelve, Faith would spend most of her summer vacations riding the orange line Metro to Union Station where she would then walk the remaining five blocks to Uncle Charles’s salon. While she had gone under the auspices of gainful employment, Uncle Charles imploring Sam to let him hire his favorite “niece” to assist with the bookkeeping and general cleaning duties, for Faith it had really served as an escape from spending her summer at a home that had become increasingly unbearable…..
On an early morning soon after she started working there, Faith was taking a bag of trash out to the bin located in the alley behind the salon. As she opened the door that led from the office into the alley and stepped beyond the threshold, her foot sunk into what she feared was a mushy pile of dog crap from one of the strays of the neighborhood. What she discovered, however, was a bowl of cat food neatly placed on the left side of the entrance beside a matching bowl of milk. Saying nothing, Faith merely transposed the bowls to the right side of the entrance. The next day, she noted that they had been re-filled and put back in their former position, so she moved them back to the right. Sure enough, the next day, they were re-filled and back on the left. When she finally confronted Uncle Charles about his clandestine feline feeding, he confessed to her that he had been doing this since he first moved into the salon and saw the homeless cats that wandered the alley. In Savannah, cats had a home; someone took care of them. From that day forward, there were two bowls of cat food and two bowls of milk outside the back door. None of the other employees ever knew about the two nuts who fed the neighborhood alley cats.
