“Mrs. McKeen. She throws pizza parties every month. But they say you’re the prettiest.”
“That’s exciting,” she said, though she didn’t flatter herself. She was the youngest teacher’s aide, and that’s about all she had going for her. She was, at best, average in every other way—shoulder-length brown hair, wide brown eyes that always got her carded, and a wardrobe that hadn’t been updated in years. New clothes required money. “I’d better get a certificate that says that on Award Day. You have any homework?”
Lucy stood up and started cleaning again, wiping down the tables and chairs with Lysol. She hoped the answer was no. He didn’t get much attention from his busy foster parents, and she tried to make up for what he didn’t get at home.
“Not a lot.” He threw his backpack onto the table. Poor thing, he looked so tired. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his shoulders drooped with exhaustion. A seven-year-old child shouldn’t have eyes like a world-weary detective working a particularly grisly murder case.
She stood in front of him, cleaning bottle dangling from a finger, arms crossed. “You okay, kiddo? You sleep any last night?”
He shrugged. “Bad dreams.”
Lucy sat back down next to him. He laid his head on the table.
She laid her head on the table and met his eyes. They were pink around the edges like he’d been trying not to cry all day.
“You want to tell me what you dreamed about?” she asked. She kept her voice soft and low and gentle. Kids with hard lives deserved gentle words.
Some people like to talk about how resilient kids are, but these were people who’d forgotten how hard everything hit you when you were a kid. Lucy still had bruises on her own heart from the knocks she’d gotten in childhood.
Christopher rested his chin on his chest. “Same thing.”
Same thing meant the ringing phone, the hallway, the door open, his parents on the bed seemingly sound asleep but with their eyes wide open. If Lucy could have taken his bad dreams into her own brain, she would have done it to give him a good night’s sleep.
She put her hand on his small back and patted it. His shoulders were thin and delicate as moth wings.
“I still have bad dreams, too, sometimes,” she said. “I know how you feel. Did you tell Mrs. Bailey?”
“She told me not to wake her up unless it’s an emergency,” he said. “You know, with the babies.”
“I see,” Lucy said. She didn’t like that. She appreciated that Christopher’s foster mother was taking care of two sick babies. Still, somebody had to take care of him too. “You know I meant it when I said you can call me if you can’t sleep. I’ll read to you over the phone.”
“I wanted to call you,” he said. “But you know…”
“I know,” she said. Christopher was terrified of phones, and she didn’t really blame him. “That’s okay. Maybe I can find an old tape recorder and record myself reading you a story, and you can play it next time you have trouble sleeping.”
He smiled. It was a small smile, but the best things came in the smallest packages.
“You want to take a nap?” she asked. “I’ll put down a mat for you.”
“Nah.”
“You want to read?”
He shrugged again.
“You want to…” She paused, tried to think of anything that would distract him from his dreams. “…help me wrap a present?”
That got his attention. He sat straight up and grinned. “Did you sell a scarf?”
“Thirty dollars,” she said. “Yarn cost me six. Do the math.”
“Um…twenty-two? Four! Twenty-four.”
“Good job!”
“Can I see it?” he asked.
“Let me get it out, and we’ll wrap it and write a letter.”
Lucy went to the desk where she and Theresa locked up their purses and keys every day. Inside a plastic grocery bag was Lucy’s latest creation—a spiderweb weave scarf knitted in a soft, silky pink and cream yarn. She carried the bag over to the table and pulled it out, modeling it for Christopher like a feather boa wrapped around her shoulders.
“Like it?”
“It’s girly,” he said, shaking his head side to side as if weighing its merit.
“A girl made it, and a girl bought it,” Lucy said. “And I’ll have you know, back in the nineteenth century, pink was considered a boy’s color, and blue was considered a girl’s color.”
“That’s weird.”
Lucy pointed at him. “You’re weird.”
“You’re weird,” he countered.
Lucy lightly tapped him over the top of the head with the end of the scarf, and he laughed.
“Go get our letterhead,” she said. “We have to write our thank-you note.”
Christopher ran for the supply closet. He loved the supply closet. That’s where all the fun stuff was hidden: the new packages of construction paper, the bags of pipe cleaners, the glitter, the markers, the pens and colored pencils, the Halloween decorations. There was also some nice stationery, donated by the mother of one of last year’s kids who owned a local office supply store. Lucy had claimed the sky blue paper with white clouds for their “company.”
“Can I write it while you wrap it?” Christopher asked, running back to the table with the paper in hand.
“You want to write the letter?” she asked as she carefully ran the lint brush over the scarf. She sold about one or two scarves a week on Etsy. To most people, the extra thirty or forty dollars a week wasn’t worth the time it took to knit a four-needle scarf. But for Lucy, every penny of that money mattered.
“I’ve been practicing letters,” Christopher said. “I wrote a whole page last night.”
“Who did you write a letter to?” she asked as she folded the scarf neatly into quarters and wrapped it in a sheet of white tissue paper.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Who’s Nobody?” she asked. “New friend?”
“I just wrote nobody,” he said.
“Okay.” Lucy didn’t push him. Especially because she had a very good idea who he’d written his letter to. More than once she’d caught him writing notes to his parents.
I miss you momy. I wish you wer at my school piknic today. Lots of moms came today.
Dad today I got a star on my homwork.
Little letters. Heartbreaking notes. She’d tried to talk to him about it, but he never wanted to admit to writing to his parents. It embarrassed him. He understood they were dead and probably thought other kids would laugh at him if they knew he still talked to them sometimes.
Christopher squared the cloud paper in front of him on the table and got out his pencil.
“What’s the scarf lady’s name?” he asked. The kid was smart enough to already know how to change the subject.
“Carrie Washburn. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.”
“Where’s that?”
Lucy went over to the map of the United States on the wall. A blue star marked where they were—Redwood Elementary School in Redwood Valley, California. She pointed her finger at the blue star and then ran it halfway across the map and stopped near Lake Erie.
“Wow. That’s far,” Christopher said.
“I wouldn’t want to walk there,” she said. “Detroit gets very cold in winter. Good to have a lot of scarves.”