ON MONDAY SOMETHING REALLY SURPRISING happens. At lunch, Ms. Crocker comes over to the table where Jeremy and I are sitting and sits down next to us. “Oh, Benny, I just heard about what happened to your dad this summer. I’m so sorry. Is he doing better now?”
At first I’m so embarrassed I don’t know what to say. I haven’t told Jeremy anything about what happened to my dad. Every time I think about it, I picture Lisa screaming “Get him off of me!” Or I remember Jeremy asking if George was an alien contacting his mother ship, like he seriously thought that was a possibility. What will he say if I tell him my dad has no hair, a scary scar, and forgets almost everything you tell him these days?
I feel my face burn red, but I know I have to say something. “He’s okay,” I say. “It takes a while I guess, but he’s a lot better than he was.”
“Good.”
I’m blushing like this is a lie, even though it’s not. These days, he does seem better about half the time. Like in the morning he’ll come down while we’re eating breakfast and say hi to everyone. Sometimes he’ll look a little surprised, like he forgot how many kids he had, or how big we’ve gotten, but he usually he seems happy. The afternoons are harder. A lot of times he’s asleep when we get home. If he gets woken up, he’s usually in a terrible mood. He’ll tell us we have to go outside even if we’re not making that much noise. Sometimes it’s only George humming, but even that is too much. He’ll say his head is about to explode if someone doesn’t turn off whatever’s making that noise.
“You let us know if there’s anything your family needs,” Ms. Crocker says. “That’s what we’re here for, Benny.”
I try to think of something I could ask her for. Should I tell her, My mom seems pretty worried about money? If the school wanted to give us some, that would be great.
Obviously I’m not going to say that. I have enough things to be embarrassed about.
Jeremy waits until after Ms. Crocker walks away to ask, “What happened to your dad?”
“He had an operation this summer on his brain.”
“Oh.” Jeremy nods. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah. I mean, sort of. It takes a while for the brain to get completely back to normal, I guess. So he still can’t do certain things.” I feel like I can’t lie to him completely. But I’m also not going to tell him that this morning my dad couldn’t remember the word for oatmeal. “Mostly he’s okay.”
He narrows his eyes in a way that makes me nervous. Like he’s trying to decide if all this is too much and he shouldn’t be my friend: first my brother, now my dad.
I wait forever until he finally says, “I think Ms. Crocker’s going to give you a footprint.”
This isn’t what I expected him to say, but I have to admit, I like the idea. It would be one thing to get a footprint from Mr. Norris after all these days of trying and waiting. It would be something else completely to get one from Ms. Crocker. “What do you mean? What for?”
“Because she feels sorry for you.” I can tell it makes him mad. “That’s the whole point of footprints, right? It’s about doing nice things for people you feel sorry for.”
No, I want to say. That’s not the whole idea. Instead I shake my head. “I doubt it. What does my dad’s surgery have to do with getting a footprint?”
Jeremy turns and looks at me. “Exactly,” he says.
That afternoon Mr. Norris starts reading a new book because he finished So B. It (which never says the mom is autistic, but she definitely is). This time it’s a book called Zen Shorts, but here’s the weird part—it’s a picture book! In fourth grade!
“This footprints program has gotten a lot of us thinking about kindness, hasn’t it?” Mr. Norris says. “I know a lot of you are trying to think of ways to show kindness to one another, so I thought maybe it would help if I read some stories about that.”
Yes! I think. It would help a lot!
Then he reads one of the stories. It’s about a man who wakes up to find a burglar in his house, stealing all his things. Instead of getting mad at the burglar, the man looks down at the bathrobe he’s wearing. It’s the only thing the burglar hasn’t taken. “Would you like this?” he says, offering the bathrobe. When the robber asks why he’s giving him everything, the man says, “I’m not. I still have the moon.”
Everyone laughs at that one. Ha! The moon! Yeah right! But I think most of us get the main point—we shouldn’t be too greedy about toys or clothes. The problem is, it’s not like any of us know any burglars to give our bathrobes to. If we did though, it’s a pretty safe bet that all of us would.