Fire in the Ashes Read Online Free

and leaned down and whispered “Hi!” before I knew that she was there. She seemed in such a pleasant mood that it surprised me when, a moment later, she asked with a slight tremble in her voice if I had the time to go outside and talk with her.
    As soon as we had left the church, she began to cry. She didn’t tell me what was wrong, and I didn’t ask. She was wearing sneakers, baggy slacks, a loose-fitting sweater, and a floppy-looking hat. Her clothes were clean but her appearance was disheveled.
    We went out for a walk.
    Sometimes when a person that I know appears to be distraught, I have a tendency to think there has to be an explanation that I can discover if I ask exactly the right questions. I feel embarrassed later when I realize that there isn’t any simple answer to my questions. Usually I know this in advance but, because of something in my personality or education, I often fall into this trap of thinking that the answer lies in talkative solutions. Walking around without a destination sometimes leaves an open space that isn’t filled already with my own predictive suppositions.
    Vicky never told me exactly what it was that made her cry that afternoon. I knew, of course, she was concerned about her children. Eric, who was sixteen now, was not doing well in school. The high school he attended was one of those places, misleadingly referred to as “academies,” familiar in the Bronx and other inner-city neighborhoods, where the course of study had been stripped of programs that might stimulate a student academically and instead was geared to practical and terminal instruction. Having lost so many years of education while he had been homeless—most of the children in the shelters, as I’ve noted, had seen their schooling interrupted frequently—his basic skills were already very low. His attendance was, in any case, haphazard.
    Vicky couldn’t help him much because she’d had so little education of her own. Her mother had died when she was five and, for some reason she did not explain, she was taken from her father and given to a guardian who, however, seemed to have abandoned the customary obligations of a guardian. She had had to leave school during junior high, which she said was not unusual in the rural part of Georgia where she had been born, and went to work “cleanin’ houses, doin’ laundry for white people” for most of the next four years. By the time her son was born and she was married and her husband brought her to New York,schooling was no longer in her mind. Although her writing skills were good (she had learned a kind of slanted printing in her grade-school years), she had little understanding of the work that Eric was supposed to do at his alleged “academy.”
    Lisette was in the seventh grade and was a better student but had also been assigned to a bottom-rated school, which was called a “school for medical careers” but did not offer courses that would likely lead to any kind of medical career beyond, perhaps, a low-paid job within a nursing home, and pretty much precluded any opportunity to move on to the kind of high school that would open up the possibilities for college.
    The apartment where the city had resettled them consisted of three tiny rooms on the fourth floor of a six-story building where there was no elevator, no bell, and no intercom. To visit with Vicky you had to yell up from the street and she or Eric or Lisette would lean out of their window and throw down the key to the front door.
    Vicky and her children were living on a welfare stipend which, including food stamps and some other benefits, amounted to approximately $7,000 yearly. (According to Martha, this was even less than the average income for a family in the area, which she pegged at$8,000 for a year’s subsistence.) She supplemented this by getting up at 5:00 a.m. two days a week to go to a food pantry at one of the housing projects, where she had to be assigned a ticket with a number to establish her