Scott Having Scott, Laurie and Bray come to his school in the middle of the day couldn’t mean anything good. Curtis’s lips were quivering before he even got the words out. “What’s wrong?” He folded to the hallway floor in a crumpled heap of limbs and tears when he heard the answer. LaDania hadn’t been a great mother. She left Curtis with Bray more often than she should have. She let him go hungry, dirty. She sold half the contents of his home to support her on-again, off-again habit. She had only responded to a fraction of the letters and artwork he sent her in jail, her responses not usually longer than one or two sentences. But she was his mother. And he had been counting on her to keep herself together, for his sake. When he finally stopped crying long enough to look up at them, Bray held his arms out. But Curtis reached up to Scott, who lifted him into his arms and held him, Curtis clinging around Scott’s neck as though he were drowning and Scott was a life buoy.
