I couldn’t believe it, either. How could I not have known about Jason’s other life? Not his other life. His life. And how close he was to throwing it away even as I thought I was doing him some good. What good was I doing if I couldn’t save a kid, a kid who wanted to be saved? Something about Jason—that smile he gave me the last time I saw him, the way he worked so hard to understand what he was reading—made losing him worse, a punch when I wasn’t expecting it. I handed in my resignation a couple of weeks after I got the news. I got one postcard from Jason. All it said was, “Im Sorry.” I didn’t write back. What was I going to say?

I moved back east. My parents would have been thrilled, had they lived to see it. They never understood why Cal and I moved to Cleveland anyway. “They have that orchestra. But really, dear, is it a place that could possibly interest you?” my father would say. I’d counter with tales of the pleasures of Lake Erie and how nice the museum was (and it is beautiful—the lagoon in front of it rivals any city park I’ve ever seen) and how inexpensive it was. And I did love it once. I could never make them understand that what I loved about it was how emphatically it wasn’t the East Coast. The land was different, the ethnic mix was different (all those Slovenian names); the way the whole place felt based on something that was real, a real industry that made real things, not something that was about status or producing money—I loved all that. It was so different from the way I grew up. But after I asked Cal to move out and then I lost Jason, I found that I began to miss the green plenty of Connecticut myself.

I didn’t give up every dream I’d ever had, though. I didn’t give up the one about getting to kids through teaching. I hoped I could stand in front of these prosperous boys and force them to think about why they had what they had and lived the way they lived. But I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t matter to me to have enough chalk, to be teaching kids whose parents read to them. It does. I’m tired of fighting the tide. It washed Jason under. Before I left Cleveland it was perilously close to taking me, too.