Eli thought about Mr. Alderman, who had never once made him feel stupid for not knowing the name of a tool, who had once spent an entire afternoon showing him how to oil a hinge, patiently, twice, because Eli had been too nervous to ask him to repeat it the first time.
Did you stay in touch with him? Eli asked.
Garrett shook his head. "He died when I was nineteen. I was already on the road by then. I heard about it months later, from a letter that took its time finding me. I rode back for the funeral. There were maybe ten people there. I thought there should have been a hundred, for a man who had handed a wrench to every lost kid who came through that place."
Is that why you ride? Eli asked. "Because of him?"
Garrett considered this, the way he considered everything, slowly and seriously. "Partly," he said. "I ride because the road is the one place where nobody expects you to be anything except moving. And partly because every town has a shed somewhere with a broken thing in it, and a kid standing in a doorway, waiting to see if anyone will hand him a tool."
He clapped Eli once on the shoulder, gently, the way you might touch something you don't want to startle, and walked out into the yard. Eli stood in the shed doorway for a long time after he left, holding nothing, feeling the shape of the chain tool still in his palm, and understanding, for the first time in his eleven years, that this man actually saw him. Not the idea of him. Not a charity case, not a problem to solve. Him.
The home's problems surfaced the way problems always surfaced at Millhaven: all at once, and in the cold.
First, the boiler began to groan. It was an old boiler, older than Eli, older than some of the staff, and on cold October mornings it made a sound like a large animal clearing its throat. Mr. Alderman went down to the basement with his toolbox and came up shaking his head.
She's tired, he said to Mrs. Pruitt. "I can keep her going, but she needs parts, and parts need money."
Then the roof over the boys' room began to leak. It started as a dark spot on the ceiling above Ben's bed, no bigger than a coin, and by the end of the week it had grown into a stain the shape of a small country, and when it rained, a slow, patient drip fell into a bucket that Ben had named, with great seriousness, "the lake."
And then, on a Tuesday, a letter arrived from the county.
Eli did not see the letter itself. He saw Mrs. Pruitt reading it in her office, through the half-open door, and he saw her face go still in a way he had never seen before. She read it twice. Then she folded it very carefully, put it in the top drawer of her desk, and closed the drawer with a soft click, the way a person closes a door on a room they do not want to enter.
What was that? June whispered later, when they were supposed to be doing homework in the empty hall.
A letter, Eli said.
From who?
The county, Eli said. "It said something about a funding review."
June's eyes went wide. "A funding review? What does that mean?"
Eli did not know. But he knew the look on Mrs. Pruitt's face, and he knew that adults hid letters in drawers only when the letters said something bad. That night, after lights-out, June slipped out of the girls' wing and tapped on the boys' room door, and Eli met her in the hallway in his socks.
She hid it, June whispered. "But I saw it. It was on her desk before she put it away. It said 'review' and it said 'funding' and it had a stamp on it, a real official stamp."
Maybe it's nothing, Eli said, but he said it the way a person says something they hope is true.
It's not nothing, June said. "Mrs. Pruitt never hides anything. She tells us everything, even the bad stuff about the boiler. If she's hiding this, it's big."
The next day, Eli watched Mrs. Pruitt the way he watched everything: quietly, from the edges. She moved through the home the way she always did, checking the kitchen, checking the laundry, checking the boys' room, where she looked up at the stain on the ceiling for a long moment and then looked away, as if the stain had personally disappointed her. She made three phone calls from her office with the door closed, which was unusual, because Mrs. Pruitt usually left her door open, on the principle that a closed door in a children's home was an invitation to imagine the worst.
June, of course, had a plan for finding out more. "We wait until she's at lunch," June whispered in the hall, "and then we look in the drawer."
We are not looking in her drawer, Eli said.
Not looking, exactly, June said. "Just... checking whether it's still there."
That is looking, Eli said.
Fine, June said. "Then you stand in the hallway and cough if she comes, and I'll check."
Eli did not agree to this. He also did not disagree loudly enough to stop it, which, with June, amounted to the same thing. In the end, they did not get the chance, because Mrs. Pruitt ate lunch in her office that day, with the door closed, and when she came out, her eyes were tired in a way that made Eli think of the boiler: something old, working hard, running low.