CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
On the fourth of December I went through the school boxes in Jess’s basement looking for a winter coat that would fit Ivy.
Four cardboard boxes and nine bags. I had been living out of the top six inches of them for two and a half weeks, which is what you do, and now it was twenty-two degrees outside and my daughter was wearing a fleece.
The coat was in the third box.
Under it, at the bottom, flat against the cardboard, there was a manila envelope with IVY HALLORAN written on it in marker, and inside that a two-pocket folder, the orange plastic kind.
Renata Cortez had put it in there.
I knew that before I opened it, because there was a sticky note on the front in the careful handwriting of a woman who runs a building.
Erin, we gathered up what we could find of Ivy’s work from this fall so she’d have something of her own. Please let us know what else we can do. R.C.
That is a kind thing to do.
I want to be completely clear about that, because of everything that comes next.
It was a genuinely kind, thoughtful, generous thing to do, and it took somebody an hour, and nobody asked her to, and I sat down on the basement steps in my coat and I have never once been able to be angry at Renata Cortez.
A math test with a ninety-two on it and a smiley face.
A drawing of a cell.
Two pages of cursive practice.
And at the bottom of the folder, in a plastic sleeve, three sheets of lined paper with a rubric stapled to the front.
The unit was called Community Helpers. It went up on the hallway bulletin board outside Room 19 the third week of October and it came down in the middle of November, and somebody put Ivy’s in a plastic sleeve.
MY DAD by Ivy Halloran, Grade 5
My dad is a firefighter for the city. He is a Lieutenant which means he is in charge of the other guys on his engine. He has done it for fifteen years, since before I was born, so I have never had a dad who was anything else.
People think the job is mostly fires but my dad says it is mostly other stuff. He says most of what they do is help people who fell down or people who locked their keys in their car. He says the fire part is like eleven percent. My mom says he made that number up.
My dad got a medal one time. It was for a basement on Fenwick Street where he got out a man and a boy who was nine. I was eight when he got it and we went downtown and I wore tights that itched. The boy he got out is in middle school now.
Here is what I think is the most important part.
Twice a year when the clocks change my dad does the smoke detectors.
He does ours and he does the one in our hallway and then he goes downstairs and does Mr. Renner’s, because Mr. Renner is eighty and he can’t get up on a chair.
He does it even though nothing is happening and it is boring and it takes him all morning.
One time I asked him why he does Mr. Renner’s and he said, a smoke detector is nine dollars and a person is a person.
So that is what I think a community helper is. It is not only the big stuff.
My dad is a hero but not because of the medal.
I sat on those basement steps for a while.
One time I asked him why he does Mr. Renner’s.
That happened. I was there. It was a Sunday in March and he was standing on a kitchen chair with the plastic cover off and a nine-volt in his teeth, and Ivy was in the doorway with a bowl of cereal, and he said that to her with the battery still in his mouth so it came out mangled, and she laughed at him and made him say it again.
And she wrote it down in October, six weeks before, and a teacher put it on a wall, and a principal put it in a sleeve, and it came to me in a cardboard box in a basement.
The alarm in that hallway had a good battery in it on the twelfth of November. Ostrander told me so in a room with a legal pad.
He put it in himself.
I put the folder back in the box and put the coat over it and went upstairs and made dinner for four people in somebody else’s kitchen, and I did not decide anything about it for two days.
On the fifth I gave it to her.
I thought about not doing it for about a day, and every argument for not doing it was a good argument, and every single one of them was also, when I turned it over, an argument for making my ten-year-old find it herself in a box in three years.
She was on the trundle bed doing homework. I sat down on the floor with my back against the dresser.
“Mrs. Cortez sent your schoolwork home. It was in one of the boxes.”
“Okay.”
“Your Community Helpers thing is in there.”
She stopped writing.
She did not look up for about five seconds, and then she put the pencil down and held her hand out, and I gave her the plastic sleeve.
She read it.
She read it all the way through, all three pages, at the speed a person actually reads, and I sat on the floor of Jess’s daughter’s bedroom and watched my daughter’s face and it did not do one single thing.
Then she squared the pages up against her knee and slid them back into the sleeve.
“Can I keep it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
She got up and went to her backpack, which was against the wall by the door, and she took out the folder and the reading log and the pencil case and the water bottle and set them all on the floor in a row.
Then she put the plastic sleeve in flat against the back panel, at the very bottom, and put everything else back in on top of it, one at a time, in the order she had taken them out.
She zipped it up.
She sat back down on the trundle and picked up her pencil.
“I’m not going to look at it,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
“I’m not throwing it out either.”
“That’s also fine.”
She wrote two lines of something. Then she stopped.
“Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“The batteries part is still true. Right?”
I sat on the floor with my back against a stranger’s dresser.
There were about nine things I could have said. Some of them were softer. A couple of them were probably better for her. I have gone back and forth on it for a year.
“Yes,” I said. “That part’s true.”
“Okay,” she said, and went back to her fractions, and that was the last conversation we had about it until the following August.
At ten past nine my phone went.
It was him.
Can I see him. I’ll come whenever you say, I’ll come around whatever you’re doing. Just tell me a day.
Then, a minute later:
Please.
I sat on the floor and looked at that for a long time, longer than it deserved, and I thought about a man on a kitchen chair with a nine-volt battery in his teeth.
I typed back one word.
Saturday.