Just for Today
She had been watching him for almost five minutes before she worked up the courage to cross the street. He was standing beside a silver car parked along the curb opposite Carver Primary, a tall man in a dark suit who kept checking his phone and then putting it back in his pocket and then taking it out again, the way people do when they are waiting for something that is not going to arrive. Lila Carter was nine years old and she did not know anything about the man except that he was alone and that he looked, from across two lanes of slow morning traffic, the way she felt: like someone who had come to the wrong place and was trying to decide whether to stay.

It was the first Tuesday of June. In less than two hours the fourth grade graduation ceremony would begin in the school auditorium, and every other child in Lila’s class would have someone in the audience. She had watched them arriving all morning from her spot on the front steps, families spilling out of cars with balloons and bouquets and hand lettered signs, mothers fixing collars in the parking lot, fathers hoisting younger siblings onto their shoulders so they could see over the crowd.

Marcus Williams had both parents and all four grandparents. Sophie Chen’s family had taken up an entire row of folding chairs during the rehearsal on Friday. Even Jordan Reeves, who lived with his uncle and complained about it constantly, had his uncle and his uncle’s girlfriend and a cousin who had driven in from Worcester with a sheet cake that said “Way to Go Jordan” in blue frosting.

Lila had no one. Her mother had died when she was six, a car accident on Route 9 on a Thursday evening in November, and in the three years since, the shape of that absence had not shrunk but had instead become more specific, more architectural, a space with walls and corners that Lila moved around inside of every day. Her grandmother, Bea, who had raised her since the accident, was home in their apartment on Maple Street with an oxygen tank beside the recliner and a visiting nurse who came three times a week and who always smelled like peppermint and spoke to Bea in the slow, careful voice people use when they are not certain they are being heard.