“I’m pleased,” I said.
“I mean it. I’m not having no trouble at all anymore, and now I got these boys. We won four games already this season. Didn’t win no games at all before I took ’em over. Were wild kids, crazy as monkeys. But we’re making it big now. Got Juma. Got a couple of other good ones too. Here, let me show you.” He took the photograph. “Him, that’s Salim. And him, Luis. You ought to see ’em play. Can you come down some Saturday?”
Just then the door banged and there stood Sheila.
Sheila?
Who stood there was a gangly adolescent with—honest to God—orange hair. Not strawberry blond, not red. Orange, like a road cone. It was longish, and permed into frizzy ringlets, a Cubs baseball cap pulled down over the top of it.
Would I have known this was Sheila if I had encountered her on the street? She’d grown taller than I’d expected. She’d been such a tiny, malnourished thing when I’d had her, that I had always kept her small in my mind, but here she was, a good five feet four or so and only thirteen. Adolescence hadn’t worked its full magic with her yet, however. She was gangly and still had the undeveloped figure of a child.
No question about whether or not she recognized me. On seeing me, she stopped abruptly, as if seeing a most unexpected sight. Her cheeks colored. “Hi,” she said and smiled shyly. That smile did it. Her features grew familiar instantaneously.
“Hi.”
All three of us were uncomfortably self-conscious. After anticipating this reunion for so long, I hadn’t expected to find myself at a loss for words, but that’s what happened. Sheila, equally thunderstruck, clung on to her half gallon of milk and stared at me. Only Mr. Renstad seemed able to find his voice. He went back to talking about his baseball team; however, he never asked me to sit down, so we all continued standing there in the middle of the living room.
Sheila’s father just kept chattering. Several times he reassured me that he had given up drugs and alcohol and put his past behind him. This embarrassed me, making me feel as if he were interpreting my visit as checking up on him. He appeared to think Sheila and I had had much more contact with each other over the years than we’d had and so alluded to events that I knew nothing of. I felt it would be indelicate of me to inquire further at this point and thus said nothing, but from what I could make out, Sheila had been in foster care between the ages of eight and ten and then again for a while when she was eleven. They had been living together since his last parole, about eighteen months earlier.
Sheila said absolutely nothing. Like her father and me, she still stood in the middle of the living room, but she made no effort to join in the conversation. I stole glances at her, particularly at her dyed hair, because it was such an unusual color. Then at her clothes. When in my classroom, she had had one single outfit—a brown-striped boy’s T-shirt and a pair of denim overalls—which she had worn day in, day out until her father had finally accepted the dress Chad had bought for Sheila after the March hearing. Sheila didn’t look as if she was faring much better these days. She wore an enormously oversized white T-shirt with a ragged jeans jacket minus the arms layered over the top. Underneath the T-shirt I assumed there was something besides underwear, as I could see what might be the fringed edge of cut-off jeans, but I wasn’t sure. Contemplating the outfit, I assumed this was fashion and not poverty showing.
Finally, when her father paused, I turned to her. “I passed a Dairy Queen coming over. Would you like to go get a sundae with me?”
Alone in the car with me, Sheila remained silent. It was by no means a hostile silence, but it was uncomfortable enough. I found myself wandering back to the very first day I had met Sheila. She had been silent then too, fiercely silent, breaking it only to announce with tigerish vehemence that I couldn’t make her talk. I kept calling back to mind that charismatic little girl I had known and trying to find her in this nervous adolescent. I was only too aware that I didn’t know this strangely clad, deerlike thing at all.
Pulling into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, I looked over. “Remember when I used to take everybody over to the Dairy Queen and buy those boxes of Dilly bars? And how Peter always wanted something different? Never mattered what it was, he never wanted what everyone else was having.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“You remember. In our class. He used to always tell those awful jokes. The real groaners. Remember him?”
A pause. “Yeah … I think. He was Mexican, wasn’t he?”
“Well, actually, he was black.”
We chose our sundaes and then went out to sit at a picnic table in front. Sheila hunched over her ice cream in a manner that evoked memories of her early days in the class, when she would clutch her lunch tray up close to her, wary, like an animal, in case someone tried to take it away from her before she finished. She began to stir her sundae. The ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipping cream all went together in a gooey mess.
“So how’s school?” I asked.
“All right, I guess.”
“What courses are you taking?”
“Just the usual stuff.”
“Anything good?” I asked.
“No, not really.”
“Anything hard?”
“Not really,” she said and stirred more energetically. “Boring, most of it.”
Looking for some angle to get a conversation started, I resorted to an old trick I’d used in the classroom to stimulate a child to talk. “So what do you hate most about it?”
“Being youngest,” she said without hesitation. “I hate that.”
An accusation? She knew I had been responsible for moving her forward a grade. Was there a second meaning here? “What do you hate so much about it?”
She shrugged. “Just being youngest, that’s all. Littlest. I was always so much shorter than everyone else, right up until just this last year. And always the baby of the class. Everyone picked on me.”
“Yes, I can see where that might cause problems,” I said, “but it was hard for us to know what was best for you.”
Another shrug. “I’m not complaining or anything. It’s just you asked.”
Then silence. I wondered whether to draw her out on this issue and chance getting into something heavy, which I didn’t feel would be appropriate just at the moment, or whether to soldier on searching for new topics of conversation. I felt amazingly uncomfortable. This wasn’t the Sheila I had expected at all.
More silence. Taking small bites of my sundae, I concentrated on the flavors.
Suddenly, Sheila expelled a noisy breath and shook her head. “This is so weird,” she said. “Like, I always think of you as someone I know well.” She looked over. “But really, we’re no more than strangers.”
That broke the ice, that admission. Truth was, we were strangers and neither of us had anticipated that. Once it was acknowledged, talking became far easier than it had been when we were pretending that the previous seven years hadn’t intervened.
Spontaneously, Sheila began to talk about her school. She didn’t like it. She was just finishing ninth grade and apparently doing well academically, but in listening to her I could tell virtually none of it had touched her. The authorities were getting after her about her hair and her clothes and her general attitude, and the way she related it, I suspected she was dealing with it by playing truant.
Perversely, the only subject that appeared to be engaging her was Latin, a language I didn’t realize was still being taught in schools. The teacher, an elderly man, was unfashionably strict and held unenlightened views