Mrs. Alvarez — he practiced it in his head, Mrs. Alvarez, Mrs. Alvarez — put a hand on his shoulder, light, not grabbing. "Class," she said, "this is Lucas Mercer. He's new. Let's make him feel welcome."
Twenty-three heads turned. Lucas looked at the floor. The floor had little speckles in it, blue and gray, and he counted seven between his shoes before a chair scraped and somebody whispered something he couldn't hear.
"Lucas, you can sit at the table by the window," Mrs. Alvarez said. "Next to Priya."
Priya had a braid so long it touched her desk and a pencil case with a horse on it. She didn't look at him long enough to be mean. She just looked, then looked away, and Lucas decided that was okay.
The morning was letters and numbers he mostly knew. His handwriting was bad. The lady at the desk in the summer — the one with the kind eyes who asked him to draw his family — had said his printing was "developing," which Lucas figured was a grown-up way of saying bad. He pressed hard anyway, until the pencil left dents.
At lunch he sat at the end of a long table because the middle was full and nobody said sit here. The milk was cold and the sandwich was turkey. He ate the way his mother taught him, small bites, don't talk with your mouth full, even though nobody was talking to him.
That's when the boy came over. He was bigger than Lucas by a head and his sneakers were white, white like brand-new paper, and he stood there with his hands on the table and looked down at Lucas's shoes.
Lucas's shoes were brown. They had been brown when his mother bought them two sizes too big "so you can grow into them, baby," and now he had grown into them and past them. The left toe was scuffed white where the leather had worn through. The laces were different colors because one broke.
"Those are the ugliest shoes I ever saw," the boy said.
The table went quiet. Lucas felt the quiet like a hand on the back of his neck.
He thought about crying. He thought about pushing the tray off the table. He thought about what his mother would do, which was nothing useful, because his mother was dead and had been dead for most of a year and the thought hit him sideways, the way it always did, when he wasn't ready.
Under his shirt, against his skin, the chain was warm.
His grandfather had put the ring on the chain that winter. A silver chain, thin and plain. "So you can wear it always," Arthur had said, "and so it won't get lost in a pocket." He had fastened it around Lucas's neck with hands that shook a little, and Lucas had felt the small weight of it settle against his chest, and he had understood without being told that this was the most important thing anyone had ever given him.
His fingers found it now, through the shirt. The oval shape. The stone he couldn't see but knew was blue, blue like the sky the morning his mother took him to the park and they lay on the grass and she told him clouds were just water being indecisive.
He looked up at the boy. The boy was waiting for something — for tears, or for a fight, or for Lucas to shrink. Lucas didn't shrink. He stood up. He was shorter. He stood up anyway.
"They were my mother's choice," Lucas said.
His voice came out steady. That surprised him most of all. He had expected it to shake, the way his whole body was shaking where nobody could see, under the shirt, under the skin.
The boy blinked. "What?"
"My mother picked them. She said I'd grow into them." Lucas looked down at the scuffed toes and then back up. "I did."
Somebody at the table laughed — not at him, a quick surprised sound, like air coming out of a balloon. Priya said, "That's actually kind of cool," very quietly, to nobody in particular.
The boy stood there a moment longer. His white sneakers shifted. "Whatever," he said, which was what big kids said when they didn't know what else to say, and he walked back to his friends.
Lucas sat down. His hands were still shaking. He finished his sandwich in small bites. When he reached for his milk, he touched the chain again, just for a second, the small oval under the cotton, warm from his own body.
Mom, he thought, and it wasn't a prayer exactly, because nobody had taught him how to pray, but it was the closest thing he had. Mom, I didn't cry.
On the walk home — Ellis drove him, but Lucas liked to say walk home in his head because the townhouse felt more like home every week — he sat in the back seat with his backpack on his knees and watched the city go by and thought about what he would tell his grandfather.
Arthur would ask, "How was the first day?" the way he asked every evening, sitting in the big chair with his hands folded, like the answer was the most important thing in the world.
Lucas would tell him about Priya's braid and the speckled floor and the math he already knew. And maybe he would tell him about the boy and the shoes. Or maybe he wouldn't. Maybe some things you kept between yourself and the warm weight under your shirt, and the woman who picked the shoes, and the sky she used to point at when she talked about water being indecisive.
The chain rested against his chest all the way home, light as a secret, heavy as a promise.
Chapter 15: Margaret's Garden
Margaret's garden had gone wild twice. Once after she died, when Arthur couldn't bear to hire anyone to touch it and couldn't bear to touch it himself, and it had stood for three years in a beautiful, reproachful tangle. And once, slowly, over the eleven years of Caroline's estrangement, when he had kept it trimmed and weeded and immaculate the way a man keeps a room for a guest who never comes — precise, and empty of the person it was for.
Now it was October, and the light in Connecticut came sideways through the maples, and there was a boy in the garden with a spade nearly as tall as he was.
"The hole needs to be twice as wide as the pot," Arthur said.
Lucas was digging. He had taken off his jacket despite the chill and his thin arms were streaked with soil. He dug the way he did everything: with total, frowning concentration, as if the earth might try to trick him.
The blue spruce stood waiting in its burlap root ball, four feet tall, blue-green needles dusted with the morning's frost. Arthur had chosen it himself at the nursery. He had stood among the rows of trees for twenty minutes, the nurseryman waiting patiently, and had finally pointed and said, "That one," because it was the bluest, and Caroline had loved blue the way some people love music — completely, without explanation.