going to KU, and she won’t be far away.”
“You should,” I add. “I’d like that.”
Eileen smiles and brings her cup up to her mouth. “Maybe,” she says.
I give Samuel a bath, so my mother can stay in the front room with Eileen. I am still not as good with him as she is, and I don’t do the bath right. I get soap in his eyes, and I leave the water on for too long. When it rises to his shoulders, he starts screaming, swatting at me, his head dipping underwater. I have to hold him close so he won’t hurt himself, and this is what finally calms him, his soapy head under my chin. His hands clutch my arms, and we stay still like this, pressed together, his heart pounding so I can feel it, until the water drains back down.
“Everything okay in there?” my mother calls out.
“We’re fine,” I say. He gazes up in the direction of my face. His blue eyes stay focused, unblinking and brilliant. I don’t know if they see me or not.
When I wheel him back out to the front room, a towel wrapped around his hair, Eileen is crying, and my mother isn’t. “Thanks, Evelyn,” my mother says. Samuel pulls himself toward her, his arms reaching vaguely forward. “Look at my boy!” she says. “Look at my beautiful clean boy!”
Eileen watches them, saying nothing, until her cigarette is all gone, turned to ash in the saucer my mother has set on the table. “You’re really not too upset, are you?” she asks finally, really just asking, not mad about it. “You said you weren’t going to be upset, and you’re not.”
My mother frowns, her hands pulling gently through Samuel’s damp hair. “No. I’m really not.”
“Seems like you should be,” Eileen says, looking out the window. “Maybe it hasn’t hit you yet.”
“Maybe,” my mother agrees.
“He had his problems, but he was still your father. He had his good points too.”
“That’s true,” my mother says.
“Probably later I’ll get really upset,” Eileen says. “When I realize he’s gone for good, not coming back. I’m sure it will hit me in a few days. That’s what they say. I’m probably just numb right now.”
“Probably,” my mother says, catching my eye, looking away before Eileen can see her do it.
Samuel is going to start first grade through the special education program in the fall. I think back to my own first grade, and I remember putting together jigsaw puzzles of the fifty states in the union, letter books, and long pages of single-digit addition. It is difficult to imagine Samuel sitting in a classroom like this. I’m not sure what or how they’re going to teach him. If someone gave him a jigsaw puzzle of the fifty states, he would just sit there, and maybe put some of the pieces in his mouth.
“They’ll work on his independent-living skills,” my mother says. She is sitting on the rim of the bathtub, leaning forward to help him brush his teeth, her hand tight around his. He doesn’t like brushing his teeth, and she has to keep her feet wrapped around his ankles so he can’t scoot away.
“But that’s what you do,” I say.
“Well,” she says, reaching for the floss, “we’ll give somebody else a crack at it for a while.” She is all talk, though. When it gets closer to the first day, she gets nervous. They have already gone through a dry run in the summer: the bus for special education students, the short bus, came out and picked up my mother and Samuel so they could run through a simulated school morning, seeing his classroom, meeting his teacher. But now the real thing is coming up, and the school has sent out a letter, polite but firm, making it clear that no parents should be on the bus on the first day of school. They will send the same bus out again, and there will be two paras on board to assist the students on their way to school.
“They used to not have any of that,” Verranna Hinckle told us, grinning as she scanned the letter. “It’s because Kenny Astor’s parents sued the district.”
But my mother is not feeling very appreciative. She calls the school secretary several times a day, attempting to weasel her way not only onto the bus but into sitting right next to Samuel for the entire morning of school. I think they are getting tired of her calling.
“Yes I know,” she says. She is