Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page B

different about it. So I figure that means you can think what you want.
    Course that means I’m gonna have to keep that garden real nice. And the cats! Geez! I just thought. Somebody’s gonna have to keep feeding all those wild cats. I wonder how much cat food costs.
    Anyway. You know what? Even this way, it’s still sad.

Chapter Nine
R EUBEN
    H e’d been in this house for three months, but nothing was unpacked. Almost nothing. The big bed was set up, made, and comfortable, so he spent a lot of time on it, grading papers, eating off his lap, and watching the news.
    He made his way through the sea of boxes to the kitchen, took a small carton of ice cream out of the freezer, and proceeded to eat standing up, right out of the carton, with a plastic spoon, the cat weaving around and through his legs. It made him feel lonely, but then, so did unpacking.
    The phone rang and proved difficult to find.
    It was Trevor.
    “Is it okay that I called you at home? I got the number from information.”
    “Is something wrong, Trevor?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Are you in some kind of trouble? Is your mother there?”
    “It’s nothing like that. I’m okay. It’s just my project. It’s not going so good. At all. It just got a lot worse. Something bad happened. Can I talk to you about it?”
    “Of course you can, Trevor.”
    “Good. Where do you live?”
    Reuben hadn’t expected that. He let the receiver slip down and looked around. “Maybe I could meet you somewhere, Trevor, like the park. Or the library.”
    “It’s okay. I’ll ride my bike over. Where do you live?”
    So Reuben gave him the address, on Rosita, just off San Anselmo, thinking as he did that this was not the fifties, where public trust was such that a student could go into a teacher’s home without anyone getting a crazy and wrong idea. But he had not thought it through fast enough or well enough, because Trevor was off the phone and on his way.
    They could talk on the front porch.
    To be extra safe, he called Trevor’s mother, who was listed in the phone book, to explain where Trevor was and why. She wasn’t home, and Reuben had no idea if she worked on Saturdays, but he left a message on her answering machine. Just in case.
    Then he looked down and realized he was in sweats, and unshaven. He managed to change into clean jeans and a white shirt and shave before Trevor arrived. It didn’t take very long. He grew beard only on the right side of his face.
     
    T REVOR DUMPED HIS BIKE ON ITS SIDE on Reuben’s lawn. Reuben realized he had never seen Trevor upset, so far as he knew.
    He stood on the bottom porch step in khaki shorts and a 49ers T-shirt. “Mrs. Greenberg died.”
    “I’m so sorry, Trevor,” he said, offering the boy a straight-backed chair on the porch. “Come sit down and tell me about her. Who she was to you.”
    “She was for my project. She was, like, my last chance.” Thenhe stopped himself, as if ashamed, and took the chair offered him. “That didn’t sound right. I didn’t mean I was upset about my project. I mean, when she died and all. It’s not that. It’s both. I mean, she really was going to pay it forward. She told me. And then she died. I went over to her house this morning. I always take the paper right up to her door. But the last couple days, it’s like she’s not home. But she’s always home. So today it was Saturday, so I just waited. And then the mailman came, and he said she hadn’t taken the mail out of her box for three days. He said her monthly check was in there and it wasn’t like her not to get it right away. So then we knocked on her neighbor’s door, and they called her son, and he came over and opened the door. And she was in bed, just like she was sleeping. Only she wasn’t sleeping. She was dead.”
    Trevor stopped for a breath.
    This was a difficult moment for Reuben. Any moment that required him to be emotionally helpful, to offer solace or understanding, was a hard moment. Not that he didn’t have