‘I hope that she is able to follow her heart,’ said Mma Ramotswe quietly. ‘I hope that she will be able to be a mechanic, but…’ She did not like to spell it out, and anyway, the doctors had said that they could not tell; the course of the young girl’s illness was unpredictable, even if they could say with certainty that she would always need the wheelchair. ‘But we do not know. There are many things that we do not know about life.’

The teacher fiddled with a piece of paper. Looking after thirty children meant that you gave thirty hostages to fortune. A parent’s heart may be broken once, maybe twice or thrice; as a teacher your heart could be broken thirty times.

‘That she is happy is the main thing, Mma Ramotswe. She is happy in the home you have given her. That is a good thing.’

Puso’s teacher had a more mixed message for Mma Ramotswe. The boy’s schoolwork was good enough, he said, but he had a tendency to daydream.

‘He has always been like that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I try to snap him out of it, but it is a very big thing for him. I have asked him what he is thinking about and he says nothing. That is what all children say, I think. You ask them what they have been doing, and the answer is nothing. You ask them what they are talking about on the telephone and they tell you it is nothing. They are very busy with this nothing of theirs.’

The teacher nodded. He knew all about that.

‘You cannot get inside their minds,’ Mma Ramotswe continued. ‘I can also see that he is daydreaming, but he will never admit it. He just sits there and smiles at you.’

‘That is better than those children who sit there and frown at you, Mma,’ mused the teacher. ‘We have more and more of those, I’m afraid.’