The night I learned of Isaiah’s death, I was twenty-four. I was at home in my minute studio apartment, grading a batch of my students’ frustratingly illiterate papers. The phone rang, my mother’s voice across the wires. I was instantly on alert. My mother had an aging southerner’s caution about the phone and was far more likely to send short cards and packages of food—even though writing was difficult for her and she didn’t particularly enjoy cooking. “Phone costs too much,” she’d say with an air of certainty. “Besides, I don’t like all that talking without being able to see you. You know I’m thinking about you anyway, boy.”

“Isaiah done got hisself killed. You better come on home.”

Those were the first words she said. I said, “What?” in a tone so mild that it sounded as though I was asking her to repeat some local gossip.

“Didn’t you hear me, boy? I said, your brother is dead. Broke his parole, got mixed up in another robbery. Got shot dead. I’ve seen the body. Your brother is dead.”

Your brother is dead. My head seemed to float off from my body at those words. I suppose I must have asked a few more questions, made arrangements to go home. But the only thing I remember is those words. Your brother is dead. I had a sudden memory of his face the last time he had asked me for help all those years ago—the help he never got. The help he ultimately stopped asking for. I left the Boston schools a few months after his death. I had lost my taste for teaching boys like these, like Isaiah, so rarely like me. I longed to be somewhere clean and uncomplicated, hewing to a higher standard. In this way, I discovered Chelsea. When I visited my mother and told her about it, she asked me only one question: “Is the boys there mostly rich white boys?”

“Yes, Mama. You put it kind of bluntly, but yes. I can do what I like there. Teach boys who are going to make something of themselves.”

She was silent for a moment. “Like you did.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Well. You done learned enough to hold your own up with them boys. I guess that’s what I was always hoping. Now that you’re doing it …”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m proud of you. I did what I could.” She looked at a picture of me and Isaiah as boys that she kept on the coffee table. She twisted her hands and suddenly looked very old. “I did what I could.” She said nothing more. After I returned east and took up my duties at Chelsea, I put Isaiah’s death out of my mind. I never think about it anymore.