Eli

They went slow down the canyon for his sake, three days of slow where she could have done it in one, and the nights they spent by the fire were how she came to know him, and the knowing of him was a gift she had not expected the road to give her, the gift of a grown person to talk to, the first in a year, the first since Papa.

He had been a schoolteacher. That undid her a little when he said it, the second night, because Grandma Kate had been a teacher, and there was a way the two of them had of laying a thing out plain that she recognized and was starved for. He had taught the little grades, the seven- and eight-year-olds, in a town on the plains she had never heard of, for near twenty years. He said it had been the great luck of his life, disguised the whole time as an ordinary job, the way the best luck usually was. He said a room full of eight-year-olds would teach you more about people than any other thing on earth if you paid attention, that they were people with the lying not yet fully installed, and that he had liked them better, mostly, than the grown versions they turned into.