The Boy Nobody Else Would Keep

So I let it sit. I let him keep himself ready to leave. And I set about, slow, in the only way I knew, trying to give him one reason at a time to not want to.

I did it with food, mostly, because food is the language I have. I learned he liked the crust more than the pie and I started making him his own little dish of just the crust with cinnamon. I learned he would eat a second helping if I did not watch him do it, so I learned to be busy at the stove with my back turned at the right moment. I learned he had never had a birthday cake that was his, not shared, not an afterthought, so when his turned up in the folder, April the second, I baked him a chocolate cake and put sixteen candles on it and set it in front of him, and he stared at it so long I thought I had done the wrong thing. Then he said, very quiet, “Is the whole thing mine?” And I said yes, baby, the whole thing is yours, and he cut a careful piece and ate it with his head down so I could not see his face, and I went and found something to do in the other room so he could have it to himself, whatever it was.

There was a dog, too. I have to tell you about the dog, because the dog told me things about Micah before Micah could.

A stray had been coming around the ridge that spring, a rough brown thing with a bad back leg, too wild to touch. I had been leaving it scraps for a month with no luck. Then one evening I looked out and Micah was sitting on the back steps, not moving, not reaching, just sitting with a biscuit in his open hand, waiting. He sat like that most of an hour. The dog came close and went away and came close. And I understood, watching him, that Micah knew exactly how to do this, because somebody had had to do it to him. You do not reach for a thing that has been hurt. You get still. You make yourself safe and boring and you wait, and you let it decide, because deciding is the only power it has left.

The dog let him touch it on a Thursday. He named it Cope. He never said why. Cope slept on the floor by the duffel, and I thought, well, at least the two of them have each other, the stray and the boy, both of them keeping one eye on the door.

Church was harder. I did not push. The first few Sundays I just told him I was going and that he was welcome and that the house was his if he would rather stay, and he stayed, and Cope stayed with him. But the fourth Sunday he came out in the one collared shirt he owned, the cuffs too short, and said he would come if it was all right, and I said of course it was all right, and we drove to Petry Baptist with my heart going like a girl’s.