Chapter 11 — BACK IN SCHOOL

Mabel started first grade on the eighteenth of November.

Bernice was right about both halves of it.

The first two weeks were bad. She would not speak in the classroom at all — not to the teacher, not to another child, not once — and she held her coat on her lap all day for nine days because she did not believe the hook was hers.

The teacher is a woman named Cassie Pruitt who is twenty-six years old and has been teaching for four years, and what she did was put a second hook next to Mabel's with a picture of a rabbit on it and said it was for the coat and Mabel could keep the hook, and after three days Mabel hung the coat up.

That is the whole intervention. That is it.

Eli went into fifth grade at Ellery Middle and was, academically, about where you would expect a boy who has moved four times in fourteen months to be, which is about a year behind in maths and about a year ahead in reading, because he had been reading library books in motel rooms for a year while his mother slept.

His teacher called me in December. Not about grades.

She said: "Mr. Harrison, does Eli have a phone?"

"No."

"He asks to use the office phone at lunch every day."

"To call who?"

"The hospital."

He had memorised the direct line to the fourth-floor nurses' station.

He called every day at 12:20 and asked whether his mother had eaten anything, and the nurses — who had no obligation to tell a ten-year-old anything — had started keeping a note by the phone so whoever picked up would know what to say.

I bought him a phone that afternoon.

The first week of December I started driving them to the hospital every day after school.

Sarah would not let them come every day at first. She said she did not want them to remember her like this.

Eli said — in the hallway, to me, not to her — "I already remember her like this."