She reached out and squeezed her son’s knee. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I just got so mad at Mr. Hodgkins that I forgot you were listening.”
“Well, I was. And I heard everything you said. And it’s not fair, Mom. I didn’t do anything at all.”
Brenda took a deep breath. “I’m not saying you did, sweetheart. But if all the other kids—”
“They’re all liars!” Josh shouted, his anger bursting forth. “How come no one ever believes me? It’s not fair!” He reached into the book bag, jerked out the book he’d been reading in the cafeteria, then began ripping its pages out, one by one. Rolling down the window, he flung the pages out into the desert breeze. Brenda could see them fluttering behind the car.
“Josh! What are you doing? Do you know how much that book cost? I had to order it special from Los Angeles!”
“I don’t care!” he shouted. “I hate the book, and I hate school, and I hate Mrs. Schulze and Mr. Hodgkins and everyone else! I hate it all!” With every furious sentence, he yanked another page from the book and flung it out the window, until he was pulling them out by the fistful, filling the area behind the car with a storm of white. “And I hate you, too,” he yelled. “I hate everybody and everything!”
Brenda reached over and snatched what was left of the book out of his hands, tossing it into the backseat. “Well, let me tell you, buddy-boy, right now I’m not too crazy about you, either.”
For a moment she thought she was going to slap her son. Then her gaze settled on the open window by his side.
For the first time in two years, it was wide open.
The little miracle had actually happened.
As Josh stared at her in amazement, Brenda threw her head back and began laughing out loud.
A moment later, though, her laughter choked off, then died. As the reality of her life, and the life of her son, closed back in on her, she began to cry.
The miracle of the open window, she decided, was just too little.
What she needed was a much larger miracle.
But where would it come from?
3
Brenda pulled the car under the sagging carport behind the apartment house and wondered for the hundredth time whether it would be better to call the landlord about peeling paint yet again, or simply organize yet another work party among the tenants to paint the building themselves. Bill Roeder might even be able to do something about the sagging beam under the carport—a post, or something.
“This place sure is a dump,” Josh remarked, almost as if he’d read her mind.
“It could be a lot worse,” Brenda reminded him. “There are millions of people who don’t even have something like this to live in.”
They climbed the stairs to the second floor, and walked down the sun-drenched walkway to the apartment at the south end. The location was a mixed blessing at best; though the apartment had windows on three sides, it also was exposed to the sun on those same three sides. By four o’clock in the afternoon the rooms had usually taken on the less attractive aspects of a pottery kiln. Still, the rent was cheap, and though she was constantly looking, so far Brenda hadn’t been able to find anything better.
As she slipped her key into the lock and pushed open the door, she was relieved to find that Mabel Hardwick, the downstairs neighbor who had volunteered to watch Melinda while she put in her hours at the café, had remembered to pull the drapes over the windows, reflecting the worst of the heat back out into the desert. The room, though relatively cool, was gloomy, however, and Brenda immediately moved to the draperies on the east wall and pulled them open. The light flooding in and the grinding sound of metal against the curtain rod awakened Mabel, who had been dozing on the sofa, the television droning a few feet in front of her.
“Oh!” the elderly woman gasped, stifling a yawn and self-consciously heaving her bulk into an upright position. “Brenda! What are you doing—” As she spotted Josh standing silently just inside the door, she clucked sympathetically. “Oh, dear. Didn’t you even make it through the first day?”
Though Josh flinched—even Mrs. Hardwick clearly thought that whatever had brought him home early from school must have been his fault—he said nothing. Before Brenda could explain the truth of the matter, Melinda, who had been sitting