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them.”
    “How many beds?”
    “Five thousand, give or take.”
    “How many homeless?”
    “That’s always a good question because they’re not the easiest group to count. Ten thousand is a good guess.”
    “Ten thousand?”
    “Yep, and that’s just the people on the street. There are probably another twenty thousand living with families and friends, a month or two away from homelessness.”
    “So there are at least five thousand people on the streets?” I said, my disbelief obvious.
    “At least.”
    A volunteer asked for sandwiches. Mordecai helped me, and we made another dozen. Then we stopped and watched the crowd again. The door opened, and a young mother entered slowly, holding a baby and followed by three small children, one of whom wore a pair of shorts and mismatched socks, no shoes. A towel was draped over its shoulders. The other two at least had shoes, but little clothing. The baby appeared to be asleep.
    The mother seemed dazed, and once inside the basement was uncertain where to go next. There was not a spot at a table. She led her family toward the food, and two smiling volunteers stepped forward to help. One parked them in a corner near the kitchen and began serving them food, while the other covered them with blankets.
    Mordecai and I watched the scene develop. I tried not to stare, but who cared?
    “What happens to her when the storm is over?” I asked.
    “Who knows? Why don’t you ask her?”
    That put me on the spot. I was not ready to get my hands dirty.
    “Are you active in the D.C. bar association?” he asked.
    “Somewhat. Why?”
    “Just curious. The bar does a lot of pro bono work with the homeless.”
    He was fishing, and I wasn’t about to get caught. “I work on death penalty cases,” I said proudly, and somewhat truthfully. Four years earlier, I had helped one of our partners write a brief for an inmate in Texas. My firm preached pro bono to all its associates, but the free work had damned well better not interfere with the billings.
    We kept watching the mother and her four children. The two toddlers ate their cookies first while the soup was cooling. The mother was either stoned or in shock.
    “Is there a place she can go to right now and live?” I asked.
    “Probably not,” Mordecai answered nonchalantly, his large feet swinging from the edge of the table. “As of yesterday, the waiting list for emergency shelter had five hundred names on it.”
    “For emergency shelter?”
    “Yep. There’s one hypothermia shelter the city graciously opens when the temperature drops below freezing. That might be her only chance, but I’m sure it’spacked tonight. The city is then kind enough to close the shelter when things thaw.”
    The sous-chef had to leave, and since I was the nearest volunteer who wasn’t busy at the moment, I was pressed into duty. While Mordecai made sandwiches, I chopped celery, carrots, and onions for an hour, all under the careful eye of Miss Dolly, one of the founding members of the church, who’d been in charge of feeding the homeless for eleven years now. It was her kitchen. I was honored to be in it, and I was told at one point that my chunks of celery were too large. They quickly became smaller. Her apron was white and spotless, and she took enormous pride in her work.
    “Do you ever get used to seeing these people?” I asked her at one point. We were standing in front of the stove, distracted by an argument in the back somewhere. Mordecai and the minister intervened and peace prevailed.
    “Never, honey,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel. “It still breaks my heart. But in Proverbs it says, ‘Happy is the man who feeds the poor.’ That keeps me going.”
    She turned and gently stirred the soup. “Chicken’s ready,” she said in my direction.
    “What does that mean?”
    “Means you take the chicken off the stove, pour the broth into that pot, let the chicken cool, then bone it.”
    There was an art to boning, especially using Miss