Most of our regulars come in the mornings. There are Marge and Walt, who wear identical yellow sweat suits and walk three miles from their house and then get matching hotcake meals with orange juice. There’s Allegria, who’s ninety-three and comes once a week in her fur coat, no matter how warm it is outside, and eats an Egg McMuffin, no meat, no cheese, no muffin. There’s Consuela, who gets four large iced coffees for all the girls at her salon.

This morning, one of the homeless folks who pepper the streets of New Haven wanders in. Sometimes my manager will give them food, if it’s about to be thrown out—like the fries that go unsold after five minutes. Sometimes they come in to warm up. Once, we had a man pee in the bathroom sink. Today, the man who enters has long, tangled hair, and a beard that reaches his belly. His stained T-shirt reads NAMASTAY IN BED, and there is dirt crusted underneath his fingernails.

“Hello,” I say. “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order?”

He stares at me, his eyes rheumy and blue. “I want a song.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A song.” His voice escalates. “I want a song!”

My manager on duty, a tiny woman named Patsy, steps up to the counter. “Sir,” she says, “you need to move along.”

“I want a fucking song!”

Patsy flushes. “I’m calling the police.”

“No, wait.” I meet the man’s eye and start crooning Bob Marley. I used to sing “Three Little Birds” to Edison as a lullaby every night; I’ll probably remember the words till the day I die.

The man stops screaming and shuffles out the door. I paste a smile on my face so that I can greet the next customer. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say and find myself looking at Kennedy McQuarrie.

She is dressed in a shapeless charcoal suit, and she’s holding on to a little girl with strawberry-blond curls erupting from her scalp in a crazy tumble. “I want the pancakes with the egg sandwich,” the girl chatters.

“Well, that’s not an option,” Kennedy says firmly, and then she notices me. “Oh. Wow. Ruth. You’re…working here.”

Her words strip me naked. What did she expect me to do while she was trying to build a case? Dip into my endless savings?

“This is my daughter, Violet,” Kennedy says. “Today is a sort of treat. We, uh, don’t come to McDonald’s very often.”

“Yes we do, Mommy,” Violet pipes up, and Kennedy’s cheeks redden.

I realize she doesn’t want me to think of her as the kind of mother who would feed her kids our fast food for breakfast, no more than I want her to think of me as someone who would work at this job if I had any other choice. I realize that we both desperately want to be people we really aren’t.

It makes me a little braver.

“If I were you,” I whisper to Violet, “I’d pick the pancakes.”

She clasps her hands and smiles. “Then I want the pancakes.”

“Anything else?”

“Just a small coffee for me,” Kennedy replies. “I have yogurt at the office.”

“Mm-hmm.” I punch the screen. “That’ll be five dollars and seven cents.”

She unzips her wallet and counts out a few bills.

“So,” I ask casually. “Any news?” I say this in the same tone I might ask about the weather.

“Not yet. But that’s normal.”

Normal. Kennedy takes her daughter’s hand and steps back from the counter, in just as much of a hurry to get out of this moment as I am. I force a smile. “Don’t forget the change,” I say.

—

A WEEK INTO my career as a Dalton School student, I developed a stomachache. Although I didn’t have a fever, my mama let me skip school, and she took me with her to the Hallowells’. Every time I thought about stepping through the doors of the school, I got a stabbing in my gut or felt like I was going to be sick or both.

With Ms. Mina’s permission, my mother wrapped me in blankets and settled me in Mr. Hallowell’s study with saltines and ginger ale and the television to babysit me. She gave me her lucky scarf to wear, which she said was almost as good as having her with me. She checked in on me every half hour, which is why I was surprised when Mr. Hallowell himself entered. He grunted a hello, crossed to his desk, and leafed through a stack of paperwork until he found what he was looking for—a red file folder. Then he turned to me. “You contagious?”

I shook my head. “No, sir.” I mean, I didn’t think I was, anyway.

“Your mother says you’re sick to your stomach.”

I nodded.

“And it came on suddenly after you started school this week…”

Did he think I was faking? Because I wasn’t. Those pains were real.

“How was school?” he asked. “Do you like your teacher?”

“Yes, sir.” Ms. Thomas was small and pretty and hopped from the desk of one third grader to another like a starling on a summer patio. She always smiled when she said my name. Unlike my school in Harlem last year—the school my sister was still attending—this school had large windows and sunlight that spilled into the hallways; the crayons we used for art weren’t broken into nubs; the textbooks weren’t scribbled in, and had all their pages. It was like the schools we saw on television, which I had believed to be fiction, until I set foot in one.

“Hmph.” Sam Hallowell sat down next to me on the couch. “Does it feel like you’ve eaten a bad burrito? Comes and goes in waves?”

Yes.

“Mostly when you think about going to school?”