The Mare

Ginger

I started calling the school, but nobody would return my calls. Finally I was told that they weren’t allowed to talk to me unless Velvet’s mother gave me written permission. And so I found somebody who could speak Spanish and I figured out how to make a conference call. But the call was near impossible. The translator was Kayla’s aunt, who’d learned Spanish in the Peace Corps. She was religious and churchy-voiced, and worse, her Spanish was apparently too crude for her to understand Mrs. Vargas’s rapid-fire style of speech. I hadn’t wanted to involve Velvet because I knew she was sick of having to read and translate for her mom. But we had to get her on the phone finally. And I don’t know why, but that seemed to help; Mrs. Vargas was clearly amused by the translator’s ineptitude. She laughed; she said she’d sign the permission letter if I wrote it, even though it wouldn’t matter because Velvet was always doing bad.

But she wasn’t doing bad. When Ms. Rodriguez finally called me back, she said that while Velvet still had “discipline issues,” she was definitely behaving better than she had last year. She was even turning in some homework and it looked like she was doing the reading.

“What about the book report about the African-American family?” I asked.

“The what? Oh, right. I haven’t assigned a book report on that. They were supposed to write on another book. Which she didn’t do. But still, I’m happy with her progress.”

I was thrown only for a second. I told the teacher that Velvet had done a beautiful job on the African-American family and that she should ask her to show it to her. And I asked her to be sure that Velvet’s mother knew about how well she was doing. Ms. Rodriguez promised that she would.