Part Two: Too Old

Some people said I was too old.

They said it at the funeral, in whispers they thought I couldn’t hear. They said it at church. My own sister, Doris, said it to my face in my kitchen two weeks later, while she was washing casserole dishes.

“Jo,” she said. “Be realistic. You’ll be seventy-two when he graduates high school. Seventy-two. What if something happens to you?”

“Then something happens to me,” I said.

“Rachel’s sister in Phoenix offered to take him,” Doris said. “She’s thirty-four. She’s got a husband and a big house and two kids already.”

I knew about Rachel’s sister.

I’d met her once. At the wedding. She’d spent the whole reception on her phone.

“Doris,” I said. “He’s Michael’s boy.”

I dried my hands on a dish towel.

“He’s staying with me,” I said.

Kevin was my whole world.

My name is Josephine Haley. Everybody calls me Jo.

I’m seventy-six now.

Part Three: Two Jobs

I worked two jobs to keep us afloat.

Days, I worked in the cafeteria at Fairmont High. Six a.m. to two p.m. Serving pizza and tater tots and chicken nuggets to teenagers who never once said thank you. Twenty-two years I’d been there.

Nights, I cleaned offices.

A company called Midwest Building Services had a contract with three office buildings in downtown Dayton. Insurance companies. A law firm. A dentist’s office on the ground floor.

I worked six to eleven, Monday through Friday. Emptying trash cans. Vacuuming carpet. Scrubbing toilets in men’s rooms on floors full of lawyers who’d gone home to houses I’d never see.

My neighbor, Mrs. Ortiz, watched Kevin in the evenings. She was a widow too. She didn’t charge me. She said it gave her somebody to cook for.

I’d get home at eleven-forty.

Every night.

And every night, Kevin would be waiting up for me.

He wasn’t supposed to. Mrs. Ortiz put him to bed at eight-thirty. Bath, pajamas, prayers, lights out.

But every night when I came through the front door, he’d be on the couch.

Wrapped in my old green afghan. The one my mother crocheted in 1962. With his eyes half-closed and his hair sticking up.

“Grandma,” he’d whisper. “I saved you the warm spot.”

He’d scoot over. And there it would be. The spot on the couch where he’d been lying. Warm from his little body.

I’d sit down in it, in my work clothes, smelling like Pine-Sol and floor wax. He’d climb into my lap. I’d wrap the afghan around both of us.

And we’d sit there for five minutes in the dark. Not saying anything.

Then I’d carry him to bed.

He did it every night for six years.

Until he was ten and too big to carry.

Then he’d just walk himself to bed. But he still saved me the warm spot.