And did they work in Ohio because she had been trying to figure out how to help her mother for 2 years. A man in Louisiana who had a building he'd been looking for a purpose for and wondered if Lily's Legacy might be interested. A social worker in Chicago who said she had been quietly identifying cases for 2 years and had no network to send them to and was this the network? Sienna answered every call. Darlene had to come to her on the second day and say with gentle precision, you cannot answer every call yourself.
That's not scalable and it's not sustainable and I need you functional not flattened. I know, Sienna said. Then delegate, Darlene said. I'm working on it, Sienna said. Work faster, Darlene said.
She was learning delegation the way she'd learned everything else by doing it imperfectly and correcting and doing it again. She brought in a woman named Patricia who had found them through the article and who turned out to have been a customer service manager for 15 years and had the specific unflappable quality of someone who had answered difficult calls professionally for a decade and a half and still cared about the person on the other end of each one. Patricia handled the incoming calls. Sienna handled the ones that Patricia flagged as needing her specific kind of judgment. The Ohio mother was connected to a network contact in Cincinnati within the week.
The Louisiana building was assessed remotely and a conversation begun with the owner about how it might serve a Lilly's Legacy expansion. The Chicago social worker became the network's first formal referral partner outside the original 11 states which meant the map on the wall of the back office had to be updated which Darlene did with the contained satisfaction of a person who has been waiting for a reason to expand a map. On the eighth day after the article Lilly's House opened, she had wanted the opening to be quiet. Not because she was modest about it. She had stopped being purely modest about the work because the work was too important for her modesty to be the thing that protected it, but because she wanted the first people to come through the door to come as themselves, not as audience members to a moment.
She wanted it to feel from the first day like what it was supposed to be a place that existed for the people who needed it, not for the story of why it existed. Hawk disagreed. Not on the principle, he agreed with the principle. He disagreed on one specific element. Let the neighborhood come, he said.
Let the people who were on the street that Saturday come and see what it became. They're part of the story, too. They deserve to see it. She thought about it and decided he was right. So, the opening was quiet in the sense of no press, no cameras, no speeches, but it was not small.
The neighborhood came. The Pattersons, Rhonda, Terrence who brought his wife who Sienna had somehow never met in 4 years of living across the alley from him, and who turned out to be a school teacher with a voice like a bell and a handshake like a declaration. Deb Kowalski came in her good cardigan and her good shoes and stood in the front room of the building and looked around at what it had become and said to Sienna quietly, "This is what you saw, isn't it? This is what you were moving toward. " "I didn't know I was moving toward anything specific," Sienna said. "I was just moving. " "That's how you get places," Deb said.
"That's exactly how. " Mrs. Delgado came with her walker and inspected the grab bars in the bathroom. First thing, she had specific opinions about grab bars, now earned expertise, and declared them adequate, which was high praise from Mrs. Delgado, and then settled into a chair in the main room and didn't leave for 3 hours, which was how Sienna discovered that what Mrs. Delgado had needed possibly for longer than the grab bars had been loose was somewhere to be.
Earl came. He drove himself, which Sienna had not been sure he would do. He had mentioned his car the way people mention things they're no longer fully confident of, and he parked carefully and came in with the formal ceremony of a man who had dressed for an occasion, and he stood in the main room and looked around and this found Sienna and said, "I want to do something. " "What? " she said. "Volunteer," he said. "I don't know what you need, but I've got time and I know how to fix things.
40 years in the steel mill, I know how to fix things. " She looked at him. "We have a building full of things that need fixing," she said. "Then we're in business," Earl said. He was there 3 days a week for the next 4 months without missing a single day. Cole was there for the opening, too, and he found her near the end of the afternoon when most of the neighborhood guests had gone and she was standing in the front room of Lilly's house for a moment alone, just standing in it, feeling its dimensions.
"How does it feel? " he said. "Like it was always going to be here," she said. "Like we just had to get here. " "Hawk's outside," Cole said. "He wants a word. " She found Hawk on the front step, the same way she'd found him on her steps that first Saturday, standing slightly to one side of the center of things and watching. He heard her come out and turned.
"Good day," he said. "Good day," she said. They were quiet for a moment. "I want to show you something," he said. He reached into his vest pocket and brought out something small, a photograph old enough that the edges were worn, the color slightly faded in the way of photographs from before everything was digital and permanent.
He held it out. She took it. A girl, 17 or so, maybe younger, with Hawk's dark eyes and a smile that was enormous and entirely unguarded, the smile of someone who didn't know yet that the world would eventually give them a reason to be more careful with it. She was in a hospital bed, but you almost didn't notice the hospital because the smile was filling up so much of the frame. "Lily," Sienna said.
"Yeah," Hawk said. She looked at the photograph for a long time. "She looks like someone who would have done exactly what you described," Sienna said. "The fairness thing, showing up for the person the world wasn't showing up for. " "She would have," Hawk said. "She did actually in the time she had.