It was heaving: an immense fried pork chop with a long protective rib of fat, a mound of mashed potato and a heap of yellow corn kernels, a biscuit, and a large cup of milk. She eyed him carefully as he took his fork, unsure whether he was meant to use the knife as well – his mother always cut his meat for him – but then blessedly the phone rang, which distracted Gladys.

From the way she answered and talked he realised she was speaking with his father. ‘Yes, sir, we be just fine. I’m giving him fried food for his supper and I bet he eats it all. Now don’t worry, and I’ll see you later at the end of the day.’

She paused and he could hear his father’s voice – rich and deep – on the line. Gladys said, ‘Yes, he cried after you left, Mr Danziger. That boy cried his share, and then some. But he done crying now.’

Which was true. His tears had stopped the very moment futility had taken over.

After this, Gladys was there every day. He didn’t know if he hated her more than he feared her, just that he felt both emotions. He tried to tell Lily this, but she scolded him in that prim way of hers that made him realise it had been a mistake to tell her how he felt. ‘She’s a Negro,’ Lily said. ‘That’s why you don’t like her.’

‘What?’ he’d tried to protest, astonished by her accusation. What was a Negro anyway? It couldn’t be anything good if Gladys was one.

At first, he asked for his mother each morning at breakfast, and daily his father replied evenly that she was still in hospital. One morning inspiration seized him and he asked if he could go and see her. No, his father explained, little kids were not allowed there, and Bobby wondered what he could do that might make his mother even worse.

His father always took him to school in the morning, and sometimes his father would tell the funny stories he had always told – about the polar bear field, which is what he called the empty lot on Dorchester, and the exotic animals that lived there whom only he and his father could see. But now he was often preoccupied and in a rush to get to his own grown-up kind of school, and even at home he would hole up in his study, typing and smoking, leaving Bobby to Gladys.

Miss Partridge was his sole ray of light. ‘Your teacher is a bird,’ Mike said at breakfast one day, and Bobby said, ‘But a nice bird’ so seriously that his father’s laugh got cut short when he saw Bobby’s expression. And then one day at school she wasn’t there, and Mrs Jacobs, who was perfectly all right but not a woman he had any real liking for, told him in the sickly sweet voice he was learning to associate with bad news that Miss Partridge had got married and wouldn’t be teaching there any more. And he was baffled at first, then stunned by yet another betrayal.

Within two weeks his father didn’t even reply to his daily question about his mother’s whereabouts, only shrugging slowly as he stood like a poor man’s Gladys over the morning’s skillet of bacon and eggs. So Bobby stopped asking. He brought it up with Mike once, but Mike said tersely, ‘She’s real sick, Bobby. I think Dad’s scared she’s going to die.’ Which explained the evening when right before bed he heard his father speaking on the phone to Gramps, saying, ‘It’s kind of tough, Dad,’ and then suddenly his father’s voice seemed to choke and Bobby realised he wasn’t saying anything because sobs had replaced words in his throat. That scared him more than almost anything, because he had never seen his father cry – he had been a captain in the army way back in a war, so how could he cry? Did this mean his mother was really going to die?

He felt he was in a dark tunnel, like the lightless hallway in the apartment that ended in the back bedroom. He could not understand why this had happened to him – he had no previous awareness of misfortune. Sometimes his parents had talked about an ‘accident’, and he knew that people sometimes died, which meant they went away for good. Like his mother? Not according to Mike and Lily, though he detected uncertainty there too, and they grew angry with him now when he asked when their mother would come back. Yet truth was, if his mother wasn’t dead, then why wasn’t she at home? She might as well be dead, he thought in an inchoate way, since four weeks seemed a year at least to a little boy his age.

He was too little to understand anything about memory or time, but he knew enough to conclude that life was something to be endured, and that in this respect he had a long, long way to go before it was over. He felt he had been propelled out of a happy existence into a misery which bore only the most superficial relationship to what he’d had before. He still had a brother and sister, there were still meals to be eaten; he still slept in a bed – but the switch to happiness was now turned off.

Then one day his father picked him up from nursery, and as they left the big brick house on Kimbark Avenue he said enigmatically, ‘I’ve got a little surprise for you.’

‘Where?’ said Bobby, rather than what, since ‘where’ remained his focus – especially where his mother was.

‘At home.