I pull back, suddenly gripped with a thought. “What about his school?” He’s used to his school — his bus, his teachers and aides. How hard will new people and routines be?

She brushes my hair out of my face. “He’ll go to a new one in Eugene. There’s a big meeting about that on Wednesday — transfer papers, his IEP, all that. The Baxters went through the same thing — you remember, the family we met at the fundraiser?”

I nod.

“Moira says that Little Lambs Village was really great about helping with the school transition.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking, because there’s no point. Changing his school at the same time as we move him into a strange place . . . That’s not fair. That’s not reasonable. Really, it’s kind of unthinkable. And I’m about 100 percent sure my mother doesn’t need me to point that out.

The afternoon is good to us. Jonah is treated to an amazing thing at Bonney Butte: a whole bunch of broad-winged hawks coasting above on the thermals. A “kettle,” it’s called, according to a man we meet in the parking lot. He and his wife must be eighty at least, both with hats and binoculars. They are just returning from the lookout point, which is only reachable on foot, and given the shortage of time, we’ll be looking out from the parking lot in the lawn chairs my dad packed.

As the midafternoon stretches on, we spot a merlin, which, it turns out, is a kind of falcon. I scoot my chair close to Jonah’s and wrap my hands around his warm arm. He never takes his eyes off the sky, and he makes a happy noise and signs bird anytime a new bird comes into view. When that happens, my dad identifies the bird and my mom looks it up in her Audubon book and reads aloud to us. We sit in our folding chairs gazing at the sky and eating the apple slices and homemade oatmeal cookies my mom packed, and it’s about as grand a final outing as Jonah could have had. Finally, when the wind picks up and brings rain with it, we pack up and turn back.

The drive home is quiet. I pull out my phone and look up birding in Eugene and discover there is an Audubon society and several good birding sites. Maybe we can take Jonah sometimes on weekends after he moves to Little Lambs Village. The thought brings a little surge of hopeful, good feelings where there so far have been none.

It’s early evening by the time we get home, and my parents cap off the day by ordering pizza — one of Jonah’s favorite meals.