She doesn’t answer.

I feel the tears start, and the words come before I can stop them. “Is that what you’ll do to me, then, if I get to be too much for you to handle? Do you have a file of ‘homes’ for me, too?” There. I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never even let myself wonder until now, because Mom would never do that. Except I never thought she’d put Grandpa in a home, and here we are.

I’m crying and I hate it and I see her looking at me like she wants to cry or hug me, and I can’t handle that, either.

“No, Ellie! Oh, never!”

I don’t want to hear it. I know she’d never really do it, but I feel dizzy, like the air’s been sucked out of the room, and I want to lay my head against something cool, a windowpane, a glass of ice water, until everything stops spinning. I roll away and down the hall so I can be alone in the dark.

Everybody says what they want you to hear until they change their minds. I thought we had an unspoken code, Mom and me. When Dad left, when the seizures were so bad, when I hardly had a friend at school, when we came here—no matter what happened, we had each other. Because family is family. But I guess not. I guess family is only family as long as it’s convenient. I mean, I know what’s going on with Grandpa is not like what’s going on with me. I’m not getting sicker. I’m not a danger to myself or other people. It’s different. But it feels the same.

There was a girl, Rita, at my elementary school, who I never told Mom about. She was in my grade but was already two or three years older. She had CP and some other stuff too—she drooled and wore a bib and couldn’t talk much. But she seemed to understand what was going on. She would follow us with her eyes on the playground from her motorized wheelchair in the shade.

They bussed her in every day from the children’s home. That’s what it was… a children’s home for disabled kids whose parents couldn’t take care of them. I don’t know if they just gave up or maybe they were old or poor or had too many other kids to look after. Whatever it was, Rita ended up in the home. They always dressed her bad—mom jeans and old Disney sweatshirts, so she looked like a giant toddler. And even though I know they probably did their best to keep her clean, she always smelled funny—like hospital sheets and diapers.