"I always had it." He held it up a little, as if to show me, as if I didn't know every stitch of it. "It was a whole blanket. I had it in my bed my whole life. It got holes. When I was six my mom said it was coming apart and she had to cut it, and I cried, so she cut out the best part so I could keep that. She sewed the edge." He touched the brown thread. "She's not very good at sewing. She said that the lady who kept me when I was a baby made it, and that it was special, because the lady made it for her own baby who died, and then she gave it to me, and that meant it was a lucky blanket, because it had love from two people in it." He took a breath. "She said the K was for the baby. Is that true?"
"Katie," I said. "Her name was Katie."
He touched the K with one finger, very lightly, the way you'd touch a bird.
"How did you find me?" I said. "Casey. How did you get here?"
And then it came out of him, in the empty grill, with the sleet coming down, all of it, the way a kid tells things, not in order, circling back, with his hands twisting the yellow square in his lap.
His mother was sick. Not sick like a cold. She'd worked at a nursing home up on Belmont Avenue, an aide, lifting old people in and out of beds, and two years ago she'd hurt her back lifting a man who weighed three hundred pounds, and the doctor gave her pills, Percodan, and they helped, and then the doctor stopped giving them, and she got them anyway, from somebody, and then she needed them. He didn't have the words for all of it. He said she slept a lot. He said she missed work and they let her go. He said sometimes there wasn't food and sometimes there was and sometimes she cried in the bathroom with the water running so he wouldn't hear. He said, fiercely, that she never hit him, not once, and that she never left him alone overnight, not ever, she'd promised him that a long time ago and she kept it. "Not ever," he said again, and looked at me hard, as if I might argue.
In October the school had called the county. He'd been missing days, staying home to take care of her, and his teacher, Mrs. Petrarca, had found him eating the crusts off other kids' trays in the cafeteria. A lady from the county came, Mrs. Stoltz, and sat in their kitchen with a clipboard, and there was a lot of talking, and his mother cried and said she wanted to get better, and Mrs. Stoltz said there was a place, a program, twenty-eight days, in Warren, and there was a bed opening up on Monday. On Monday the nineteenth. This Monday. And while his mother was there, he would go into a foster home.
"Mrs. Stoltz said wherever there's a bed," he said. "She said maybe Boardman. Maybe Austintown. She said she didn't know yet. She said they were very short." He was looking at the square. "My mom asked could I go to my aunt in Niles but my aunt said no. She has her own problems, my mom said."
The night after Mrs. Stoltz came, his mother sat on the edge of his bed and held the yellow square and told him about me. She'd told him before, he said, a little, when he was small: that there was a lady who kept him when he was a baby and his mom couldn't, and that the lady loved him, and that's where the blanket came from. But that night she told him more. My name, Dodie. That I worked at Helen's Grill in Struthers, because I'd told her so once across the table at the county office, the only thing I ever said to her that wasn't about diapers or formula, and she had never forgotten it. That I'd walked him up and down the hall at night singing. That every Wednesday when she came for her visits I handed him to her, and he cried for me, and she hated me for it, and then she went home and couldn't sleep for thinking about how I'd looked when I let him go.
"She said you were the only time I was ever safe for sure," Casey said. "Before her. She said she always meant to write you and tell you I was okay, and she never did, because she was ashamed. She said that was one of the things she was going to fix. When she got better."
"So you came," I said.