So Walter came to me.
I was sixty-two then. A retired school librarian. A widow for nine years already. I lived alone in a little blue house on Maple Street with a cat named Pickles and a garden full of tomatoes I talked to.
And suddenly I had a five-year-old boy who wet the bed and screamed in his sleep and wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t beige.
I learned. You learn. I learned how to pack a lunch he’d actually eat. Peanut butter and honey, crusts off, cut into triangles, never squares. I learned how to walk him to school every morning and stand by the fence until he was inside the door, because if I left too soon he’d panic. I learned which night-light had to stay on when he couldn’t sleep. The blue one shaped like a moon. Not the yellow star. The yellow star made scary shadows on the closet door.
I learned that when he was sad, he didn’t cry. He went very quiet and very careful, like a grown-up. That was the worst part. A five-year-old being careful.
