Chapter 8 — THE LIAISON

Eli had been out of school for eleven days.

Mabel had never started. She should have been in first grade in September and it was now November and my granddaughter had never been inside a classroom.

I found this out because I asked Eli what he had been doing all day and he said "watching Mabel," and I said "what about school," and he said, in the flat way he says everything, "we moved."

They had moved four times in fourteen months.

Ellery in August, from an apartment in Kingston that they lost when Sarah could not work.

I did not know who to call, so I called the school district's main number like a fool and got a receptionist, and I said I have two children who are not enrolled and I am not their guardian, and she said, without missing a beat:

"You want Bernice."

Bernice Adeyemi is the district's homeless liaison. Every district in this country is required to have one. I did not know that. Almost nobody knows that.

She met me at the diner because I did not have anywhere else to meet anybody.

She is about fifty-five and she had a folder and she listened to the whole thing without writing anything down and then she said:

"Okay. First thing. They're enrolled tomorrow."

"They can't be. I'm not the guardian and their mother's in the hospital."

"Mr. Harrison, there's a federal law called McKinney-Vento. A child living in a motel is legally homeless. That means the district has to enrol them immediately — same day — with no proof of address, no birth certificate, no immunisation record, no guardian signature."

I said, "That can't be right."

"It's right. I do it about forty times a year." She was already writing. "Which motel?"

"The Bluebird."

"That's Fairfield Elementary and Ellery Middle. I'll put transport on both, the bus will stop at the motel." She looked up. "The little one's never been in school at all?"

"No."

"Then she's going to have a rough two weeks and then she's going to be fine."

I want to say something about Bernice Adeyemi.

Over the eleven months of this, I dealt with a lot of systems. Some of them were slow and some of them were cruel by accident and one of them nearly took those children away from me on a technicality.

Bernice enrolled two children in a diner booth in forty minutes using a phone and a folder.

She is paid, I found out later, less than my building manager.

She asked one more question before she left.

"Who's the emergency contact going to be?"

"They don't have one."

"They need one. It can be anybody. It doesn't confer any rights, it just means the school has somebody to call."

I said, "Put me."

And she wrote *Walter Harrison, grandfather* on a form, and that is the first time in the entire eleven months that word appeared on a piece of paper in connection with my name.

I looked at it upside down across the table for a long moment.

Bernice saw me looking.

She did not say anything about it, which I appreciated.