The best thing about what was left of Thanksgiving break was Jack. He was like my new shadow, followin’ me everywhere I went. And when I sat down or rested on my bed, he’d curl up right there with me. I spent a whole lot of the weekend talking to Jack.

I also spent a whole lot of the weekend wishing Jack could talk to me. I had questions! Had Mrs. Graves taken him in after he’d become One-Eyed Jack? Or had the Mirror Cats slashed his eye? I wished he could tell me.

The worst thing about the weekend was not the shopping or the chores. It was Sunday morning, when it was just Jack and me in the apartment and Ma was at work. I almost wished she’d made me go to Brookside with her.

It wasn’t just being trapped by my promise to stay inside the apartment. It was everything that was going on outside the apartment. I guess they wanted to clear Mrs. Graves’s place out quick, ’cause even though it was Sunday, workers were walking back and forth, back and forth, emptying out the apartment. I spied on them through the window blinds, careful not to let on that I was home. Someone figuring out I was home was the first step in them knowing I was home alone.

The workers did carry out some boxes of stuff, but mostly what they hauled away were black trash bags, stuffed full and round. One after the other after the other. It was like an army of big black ants marching past, working in a line.

I wondered about Mrs. Graves’s feuding sons. Where were they? The men cleaning out the apartment were hired workers. I could tell by their boots and shirts and the way they marched along and worked together. This was a job. They didn’t care about anything else.

So why weren’t the sons here? Didn’t they care?

I also wondered about all the stuff Mrs. Graves had saved, thinking she might need it someday. Toothbrushes, toilet-paper rolls, butter tubs, bread bags…it was all being hauled off to the dump. She treated it like treasure, but to everyone else it was just trash.

It all felt sad. And it lingered in my mind long after the army had stopped marching. I couldn’t figure out answers for any of it, and after Ma was finally home, she was no help at all. “Hoarding’s a common problem with seniors, and folks have fallings-out, Lincoln. You can’t solve all the world’s problems. You gotta start by fixin’ your own.”

Seemed kinda funny coming from someone who’d delivered zombie chicken to a homeless guy and sat up all night with a dying stranger. And what had Ma meant about “fixin’ your own”?

I was almost asleep when I remembered how Ma had called her sister to patch things up. She could have just left things as they were, but she’d called Ellie and tried to make them better. I lay there in the dark, figuring out, finally, how important that was.

Then my mind started rewinding. Working backward in time, thinking about all the things that had happened since Ma had made her resolution on New Year’s almost a year ago.

I always knew Ma worked hard. And I knew she’d made a plan and was sticking to it. As tough as everything was, she was sticking to it.

But there was something else. Something I hadn’t known before. And right there, in the dark, it clicked. More than any of the heroes in my stories, more than any other person I’d ever known, Ma was brave.

Truly brave.

And seein’ that clear as day right through the dark made me know something else. It had come and gone in little waves before, but it was settling now, way down inside.

I could be brave, too.