When dreams are a lifeboat
They are dressed in identical school uniforms: white blouse, blue skirt, white knee socks.
Penny Labadie, 6, is the quiet, thoughtful one; her sister, 5-year-old Abby, is the sassy one.
"Would you like to hear me sing?" Abby asks, her arms folded.
A tiny voice, she launches into a football cheer.
"Firecracker, firecracker, boom boom boom. The boys have the muscles, the girls have the brains."
Penny giggles in between bites of the ready-made macaroni and cheese that her father heated up in the microwave that sits atop a small refrigerator.
The girls are sitting on a bed in a Cambridge motel that is sandwiched between a bowling alley and a long-defunct nightclub. Since Friday, when their family was evicted from their Roxbury Crossing townhouse, this has been home.
Penny and Abby Labadie are blissfully unaware of just how adrift their family is. The motel stay, which has complicated their commute to the Renaissance School in Back Bay, has been sold to them by their parents as a great adventure. The girls seem to buy it, and ask to invite friends over. But they know something is wrong, because their mother, Bedellia Labadie, occasionally weeps. The girls take turns walking over and wrapping themselves around their mom.
Trying to make sense out of why the Labadies are homeless is no easy task. At one level, their eviction, ordered by Judge Marylou Muirhead in Boston Housing Court, was all done by the book. But on closer inspection, you get the sense the books were cooked, that there was no way their rent dispute with Cornerstone Corp., the company that owns 51 percent of the 346-unit Roxse Homes development where they lived the last four years, was going to end in compromise.
Bedellia and her husband, John, believe they are being punished not for late payment of rent, but for being among the tenants who have backed a legal effort to get rid of Cornerstone and its property manager, Linda Evans.
Evans didn't call me back. Bob Russo, Cornerstone's lawyer, was unapologetic for getting the Labadies evicted and denied it was retaliatory.
"We bent over backwards to help this family," he said. "They failed to cooperate. These people flaunted the system. People like the Labadies look at you and smirk. They do a disservice to their family."
Russo said he wasn't on speaking terms with the Labadies' lawyer, David Fried, whom Russo had disqualified from the case on the grounds that Fried's representing the tenants' council in a separate legal matter amounted to a conflict of interest.
"Had he called me up, hey, maybe this could have been worked out," Russo said.
Fried said the Labadies' eviction is part of a pattern of arbitrary and vindictive actions carried out by Cornerstone and pointed out that it comes just weeks before tenants will vote on whether to continue the case against Cornerstone. He says that, if anything, the Labadies paid more rent than they owed, as Cornerstone manipulated the payment schedule to put the Labadies in arrears.
In the end, the amount in dispute was $89, which, by coincidence, is the day-rate posted on the sign outside the motel.
Somewhere along the way, while the adults were squabbling, everybody seemed to forget that the people with the most to lose in this whole sorry saga were those with the least say: Penny and Abby.
The Labadies, who also have a 17-year-old son living with them, have not told their daughters that the motel voucher runs out tomorrow. They have been trying to find a place to live, but don't have enough for a deposit.
Penny turns 7 on Saturday.
"I want to be a designer," Penny says, looking to the ceiling of the motel room as if it were the future.
Abby wants to be a teacher.
"But I'll still sing," she insists.
Two little girls, sitting in a motel in Cambridge, where everything has been taken from them but their dreams.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
