Brown eyes that always dropped down to the table at lunchtime, while the other kids opened their brown paper bags and their metal lunch boxes with cartoon characters on them.
He never had a lunch. Not once. He’d sit there with his hands in his lap and watch the other kids eat, and when anyone looked at him, he’d pretend to be reading something.
“You were hungry,” I whispered.
Malcolm nodded slowly.
“You noticed,” he said.
The memory came back in pieces.
I was sixteen that year. My father had hurt his back at the shipyard, and my family needed money. So I took a job as a teacher’s aide at Franklin, three afternoons a week and every lunch period. I helped in the classrooms. I watched the cafeteria. I made a dollar ninety an hour.
School lunches cost forty cents back then. I know he said three dollars, but that’s how he remembered it, and to a hungry eight-year-old forty cents might as well be a fortune.
