Evangela Stanley stood on the corner across the darkened street, watching as the crew of Engine 7 hosed the clotted blood from the sidewalk outside her restaurant.
It was her son’s 19thbirthday.
Things were slow, and he had left about an hour before it happened.
An hour that might have saved his life.
Mondays are usually quiet, and it being the day before Christmas Eve, it was all the quieter, with just one customer in the place, so at 7 she walked from behind the counter and across the small dining room at People’s Choice Kitchen. As she reached the door it swung open violently and two men barged in.
They had hoodies on. At least one of them had it tied up around his face covering all but his nose and eyes.
The other had a gun, and he had it in Evangela Stanley’s face.
She’s not a tall woman, and she’s not a young woman.
But she’s a good woman, and for the month of December it’s been pay what you can afford at the People’s Choice Kitchen. Things have been tough at Brooks and Thurston for a generation, and the census numbers last week showed Rochester is the third-poorest big city in America. And she felt that, and she put out the word on Facebook. Come eat, and pay what you can. If you can’t pay anything, come eat anyway.
It’s good food. A cross between Jamaican and what they used to call soul food. Each morning if you go up there early enough you can smell her smoker outback. And over the last month, a lot of people with no money in their pocket have had rice and jerked chicken in their belly.
The guy with the gun scuffled with her, for half a moment, just long enough to wrench her knee, and just long enough for the lone customer to leap at the man with the gun. Evangela Stanley isn’t certain what happened next, but she broke free and ran to the basement, calling 911. She was so frantic she couldn’t tell how many shots were fired.
Was it one, or was it two?
She can’t remember.
But nobody was hit, and in the moment after the unarmed customer tackled the gunman, his momentum carried them both through a picture window on the front of the restaurant, leaving each man grievously slashed by the broken shards of glass.
It was mostly the robber’s blood out on the sidewalk, with the customer’s blood pooling inside briefly, and then spattered in a galaxy of droplets in front of the counter where he lingered waiting for the police and ambulance.
The gunman and his pal would flee, but New York State Police appear to have snatched them up on Avenue D before 11 p.m. Two men, dressed like the bad guys, driving a vehicle like theirs, with a gun, and one of them was leaking profusely.
On the corner, watching as the firefighters rolled their hose and the Emergency Enclosures men measured the window opening for plywood, Evangela Stanley was strong. She wouldn’t break down until after midnight, in the parking lot of a grocery store, buying supplies for two Christmas Eve catering jobs. She sat in her car and sobbed, overwhelmed by the emotion of what happened, and the fear of going home to an empty house. She didn’t dare go in until a tall Dutch cop checked it out for her. Not that these robbers knew where she lived, but the demons did, and they haunted and followed her in the aftermath of adrenaline.
“It’s my son’s birthday,” she said repeatedly on the corner.
What she meant is that it also could have been his death date.
If business hadn’t been slow, and if she hadn’t sent him home early – to visit with a school friend home on leave from the Army – he would have been there, in the dining room, and when a man put a gun in his mother’s face, he would have fought. And the good guys don’t always win those fights.
But God sent her boy home, and called another man to come to her aid.
And her good was repaid with evil, until God made it right.
Two days before Christmas, at a restaurant where the poor have eaten free for a month, and where Christian posters hang, and where a neighborhood lady just wants to give back, men came with violence in their hearts. It could easily have been Evangela Stanley’s blood on that floor, but a hero saved her life.
And a bullet hit nothing but wall.
And the status quo of urban violence is what it is.
And Evangela Stanley is who she is.
The People’s Choice Kitchen will open at its regular time today, and those who can’t afford to pay will eat for free.
And another angel’s deeds will sing, in spites of evil’s attempt to stop her, “Peace on earth, good will toward men.”