Melanie gives her the yellow couches from the sunroom.
“They were my mom’s. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of them so her feelings won’t be hurt. If you take them, she’ll be happy and I can get something I like. I mean, don’t feel you have to keep them. As soon as you find something better, just toss them.”
Sarah spends the last of her savings paying two guys from her old apartment complex to haul the couches up and heave the stranger’s chair in the dumpster. Watching it go over the edge — gone, forget it, she doesn’t need it — is exhilarating.
Now that Sarah has a car, Melanie begins leaving her money to buy groceries. She tries new vegetables and spices every week, makes casseroles from recipes rather than remainders. One day she goes to a store that sells nothing but fish because she’s going to try making seafood paella, a recipe she found in one of Mrs. Cuppernell’s old cookbooks. At the counter she explains to Bea why the fish are on beds of ice and what “deveined shrimp” means.
On the way home they pass Melanie’s school. It’s lunchtime and the students are out playing, so Sarah texts Melanie, who brings them in to see her classroom. While Bea looks around and Grayson dozes in the stroller, Melanie and Sarah stand at the window.
“Is that him?”
Ethan stands alone against the building, his thick, uncombed hair snagged on its bricks, trying to feign preoccupation with a stick, though it’s painfully obvious he’s just standing, excluded from four-square, basketball, the climbing wall, the monkey bars.
“The way he acts, nobody likes him,” Melanie says. “It’s heartbreaking.” She goes over to help Bea feed the fish.
Ethan twirls the stick like a baton, scraping his fingers on its rough bark. He examines his hand, rubs the pain away, then begins rolling the stick against the building, trying to sand it smooth, until one of the playground monitors, a surly woman in a bright yellow jacket, tells him to quit. Sarah can’t hear every word, but it’s clear she’s telling him he’ll damage the building and Ethan is pleading his case: it’s just a stick against brick. The monitor shakes her grumpy face and points to the ground. Ethan throws the stick down and walks several feet away, to stand behind the trunk of a massive oak. The woman yells something else and he sulks back toward her, forced to take up a position in full view of the other kids.
Childhood, Sarah thinks: a prison made up of lack. A lack of words, of knowing better, of being believed. You are at everyone’s mercy.
Back at Melanie’s house she looks through the toys and comes across a Rubik’s Cube, its edges pockmarked by Gray’s teething, its colors hopelessly jumbled. On the way home, she buys a new cube and the next day prints off tips on how to master it. That evening, she gives them to Melanie.
“He’ll have something to do on the playground at least.”
A week later Melanie reports that Ethan takes the cube out every day and that some other boys have started gathering to watch him.
“It’s really improved things for him. It was a brilliant idea. You should be a teacher. Have you ever considered that? Going to college?”
Sarah dodges the question with a vague plan about saving money. The truth is she has no idea how to go about getting into college, let alone paying for it. Melanie suggests federal loans, scholarships. “Didn’t the school counselor help you with any of this?” Sarah has no recollection of such a person at any of her high schools. A few weeks later, while watching a show about Albert Einstein, she wonders if that’s what went wrong. Maybe you couldn’t switch schools, houses or families too often or too quickly. It frayed the net of space and time. You had to stay put, let the moments link themselves like runners passing the baton. If you don’t, your life slips through, like her mother’s pots and pans.
Rubik’s Cube as anodyne has a short half-life. Within a month, Melanie reports that Ethan is being made fun of because he is too attached to the cube.
“He’s amazing at it, actually, very, very smart, and at first the other boys were impressed, but they can’t do it as well, so now they’re mad, and he just won’t put it down. I finally had to take it away. I mean, I give it to him during recess, that’s it. Otherwise he’ll never listen or do anything else.”
Melanie says watching him align the squares, his face no longer a simulacrum of absorption, but truly captivated, makes her cry. “I mean the thought that a colored block of plastic is all he has.”
“He has his mother,” Sarah says.
Another eye roll. “He comes to school in the same clothes all week and when we have food, you know, for holidays or birthdays, he eats like he hasn’t had a meal in days.” Melanie shakes her head. “I wish I could get some evidence on her, something to report to child services.”
“Don’t do that.” Sarah hears the sharpness of her tone too late, but Melanie is oblivious.
Unloading a stack of papers covered in large, loopy handwriting, the lines of text sloping up and down, she says, “I’m keeping my eye on things. I don’t like that woman.”
Sarah finds Ethan’s last name in Melanie’s grade book, looks up his address and drives by several times thinking vaguely of warning them: be careful, they’re watching you. Their building is a yellow brick fourplex on a street that backs up to a grocery store and gas station. The windows are the same type of silver ones she has in the new apartment and she wonders if they ice up the same way.
One Sunday Ethan is sitting on the front stoop in a jacket and no hat, hands clasped between his knees. Sarah circles the block, then pulls over and gets out. “You okay? Are you locked out?”
Ethan looks at her a long moment as if he doesn’t speak English. “No.”
“Well, what’re you doing sitting out here? It’s awfully cold, and you don’t have a hat or gloves.”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s a light jacket. Do you have a coat? A winter coat?”
Ethan stares at her sullenly. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of your mom’s.”
“She’s inside.” Ethan scoots over for her to pass.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“I have to stay out here.”
“Have to? Why?”
Again he gives her that look that lets her know she has no business here.
“Is your mom making you stay out here?”
The door opens. Sarah looks up, startled.
Ethan’s mother is very skinny. She has a pale face pockmarked lightly around the mouth and thin hair dyed the color of a brand-new penny. A dark line cleaves its two halves.
“Your friend is here,” Ethan says. His voice is high, almost broken.
“I don’t want anything. And I don’t appreciate you talking to my kid.”
“I’m not selling anything,” Sarah mumbles.
Ethan looks between his mother and Sarah.
His mother steps outside. “Are you looking for somebody?” Her voice is hard and annoyed.
“Sorry, I just stopped because I thought maybe he was locked out.”
“You just drive around talking to strange kids?”
“Well, it’s pretty cold.”
“What?”
“It’s cold, so I was worried.” Sarah has to use the bathroom. She contracts her muscles and the urge recedes.
Ethan speaks up. “She said you were friends.”
The mother looks at Ethan, registering his claim, then back at Sarah, alerted that something is wrong. “Is that your car?”