He remembered them all. He could not explain how it worked any more than he could explain why he could recognize his mother's footsteps before she reached their apartment door. Some people saw information and gradually forgot it; for Miles, images often remained arranged in his mind as though the pages were still open. The gift was not perfect understanding, and it could not tell him whether something he read was correct, but it gave him a strange and powerful way to hold on to things.
Rebecca Underwood had cried when the counselor told her. Not because she was frightened of having an unusual child, but because the counselor spoke about possibilities Rebecca had barely dared to imagine. There were enrichment programs, scholarship applications, and summer classes for children who learned quickly. Rebecca took the brochures home in a plastic grocery bag and placed them beside the photographs on the living-room shelf.
"My brilliant boy," she had said, kissing Miles on the forehead. "All I want is for you to get a chance to see what you can do."
Miles remembered that conversation more clearly than almost anything else in his life. He remembered her blue work shirt, the missing button near the collar, and the way the kitchen light buzzed above them. He remembered asking whether brilliant people still had to wash dishes, and the laugh that rose out of her before she handed him a towel. Then he remembered his mother saying that being clever mattered much less than being kind.
Rebecca had worked wherever someone would give her enough hours to keep the lights on. She cleaned offices after business hours, sometimes helped in a warehouse on weekends, and occasionally took shifts at a hospital cafeteria through a temporary agency. She left notes on the refrigerator reminding Miles to eat the food she had prepared and not to answer the door to strangers. When she was home, she listened to him talk about planets, bridge construction, bones, trains, and anything else he had spent the day learning.
His favorite evening was Thursday. Rebecca finished her longest shift by seven, and if everything went according to plan, they ate scrambled eggs and toast at the small kitchen table while she asked him to teach her something new. He explained why ships floated, how a heart pumped blood, and why different bridges used different shapes. She sometimes asked questions he could not answer, and those were the questions he loved best because they gave him something to investigate.
Their problems had not arrived all at once. Rebecca's mother became seriously ill, and money disappeared into prescriptions, transport, lost workdays, and bills that seemed to multiply after every appointment. The older woman died, leaving Rebecca with grief she had no time to process and debts she could not easily escape. Rent increased, one of Rebecca's employers reduced her hours, and the emergency savings she had carefully protected vanished faster than she could replenish them.
Rebecca took double shifts because the alternative was an eviction notice. Miles learned to fall asleep to the sound of the apartment refrigerator rather than to his mother's voice. He tried not to ask for new shoes when the old ones split, and he stopped mentioning school trips that required payment. Still, she found ways to make birthdays special, even if all she could afford was a grocery-store cupcake with a candle stuck into the frosting.