Reading with Patrick

Patrick’s first assignment was to write a letter to his daughter. Kuo thought it would comfort him to think of Cherish. The exercise was also to teach him that “writing [is] a direct address to another person” (134). When Patrick emerged for their visit, she asked how he was. He said that he was stressed out. Someone he knew was admitted the night before for domestic abuse. He then asked Kuo if she could get him some cigarettes. She demurred, knowing that it was contraband. When she asked to see his homework, Patrick said that he hadn’t done it and Kuo expressed her displeasure with him.

Meanwhile, Kuo started teaching at KIPP. In terms of safety and studiousness, it was a world apart from Stars. The students were respectful and talked frequently about colleges.

The next day, Patrick handed Kuo his assignment before they even greeted each other. Kuo was shocked by his messy handwriting. Moreover, his commands of grammar and mechanics had severely declined, and the message he wrote for his daughter focused only on his absence and depression.

Kuo began with a lesson in grammar. When it was time to leave, she told him that, if he kept doing his homework, she would bring him the cigarettes he wanted.

Kuo went to Central High and obtained Patrick’s transcript. He had made only Ds and Fs in one semester. She asked the secretary for the list of dropouts from 2006. Kuo recognized most of the names, but their reasons for leaving school were inaccurate. Girls who had gotten pregnant were listed as having moved out of state. While at Central, Kuo saw her old friend Ms. Riley, who was in charge of “in-school suspension,” a form of “all-day detention” at the high school (142). She complained about how wasteful it was to let Stars be abandoned. She also talked about how dysfunctional Central was. The children were rowdy, and the teachers were afraid of them. She missed how close people in Helena had once been, how it was once a village where people relied on and trusted each other.

Before visiting Patrick the next morning, Kuo drove to the tobacco store and bought Buglers—the tobacco Patrick had requested. When she arrived at the jail, she pulled the tobacco out of her bag and a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Patrick began to read awkwardly. They each had their own copy and took turns reading aloud.

Kuo began keeping a composition book with all of Patrick’s homework. The jailers frequently moved him between cells, and she didn’t want his work to get lost. She edited his writing thoroughly, began visiting him twice a week, and assigned vocabulary quizzes on Fridays. He used the tobacco she brought him to trade for junk food. One day, he handed her a Snickers bar as a gift.

One Monday morning, Patrick asked about Kuo’s weekend. She told him that she hung out with Danny and Lucy, making bean soup and watching a movie. Patrick asked if she had a boyfriend. She hesitated to answer, but wondered why he shouldn’t be able to ask about her personal life if she asked about his. She lied and said that she had one but ignored him when he pressed further. She asked to look at his latest writing assignment and found that he wrote something that expressed sexual interest in her. She wondered if she had encouraged him at all and glanced down at her clothing, which was baggy. Then, she remembered that she was a young woman, and he saw no one but men. Still, she enforced the boundary between them and told him that his message was inappropriate. Patrick was embarrassed and never crossed the line with her again.

Patrick later asked Kuo to pick cigarettes up from his family to save money. Kuo visited Patrick’s house and met his father. She saw how James’s “right leg was disfigured, twig-like” (151). She asked for the cigarettes and he rummaged for them behind the sofa. She also told him the news about the court date and he introduced her to Jamaal, the son of Patrick’s oldest sister.

Kuo hesitantly asked James to tell her what happened on the night of the killing. James reported that he heard arguing. Marcus reached into his pocket while Patrick yelled at him to get out of the yard. Patrick entered the house, saying he didn’t do anything. One of Patrick’s sisters called the ambulance for Marcus, who was dead. James believed that Patrick and Marcus had argued once before, but Patrick previously avoided a fight, despite Marcus slapping him with a shoe. Kuo asked about Patrick’s mother. James said that she worked a lot and cried, even when talking to Patrick on the phone. James used to visit Patrick, but his son asked him to stop, unable to stand his father seeing him locked up.

James admitted to Kuo that, when Patrick was little, he saw his father doing things that no child should have been exposed to. Kuo was unsure about what he meant. James admitted that he was involved with drugs. He went to jail, too, but didn’t care. However, Patrick was an emotional person, and empathized with how it felt for others to see him locked up. James was the opposite and believed he’d lost all feeling long ago.

Kuo soon started visiting the Helena jail every day. She and Patrick continued to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. For one homework assignment, Kuo asked Patrick to select a child from the book whom he could relate to. He chose Edmund, whose feeling of mysterious horror Patrick related to his own sensations of disbelief around being incarcerated.

Kuo continued to pick up cigarettes from Patrick’s house, and they continued reading the book. Patrick wondered if Narnia was a real place. Soon, Kuo instituted silent reading. She was present when Patrick finished the book and registered his feelings of disbelief, of not wanting the story to end. She described to him the arc of a story, with rising and falling action. When she asked him what the climax was, he noted the moment when Edmund, his favorite character, was forgiven for siding with the witch and given a sword. 

Kuo next introduced the haiku to Patrick and wondered if he even knew about such poems. The next day, they read haikus silently. Patrick was amused by some of them. He picked out his favorites and related them to his own life. A poem about dew triggered a question about rain. Kuo said that it had been raining when she entered the jail. Patrick missed the rain. He never knew what the weather was like.

Patrick and Kuo read more haikus. She asked him about aspects of nature—a mountain, the ocean—and asked if he had ever seen them. He either hadn’t or wasn’t sure.

That Sunday, Kuo went grocery shopping at Food Giant. While picking through wilting fruit and vegetables, a group of strangers came up and asked if she was in Richard Wormser’s movie. They complimented her and the film. One of the strangers said that he had shown it to a teacher in a workshop and used Kuo as a caring example. One teacher got offended, thinking that his comment about Kuo was a judgment about her. The offended instructor then said that Patrick, featured in the film, was in jail for murder. The strangers wanted to know if this was true and Kuo told them it was. The group was disappointed. She wanted to elaborate, to tell them how well Patrick was doing. However, what they really wanted to hear was that he hadn’t murdered anyone. Kuo then excused herself and pushed her cart away.

The next time she greeted Patrick, he asked if she had passed the bar exam. She had and said that her friends, Danny and Lucy, took her to a Mexican restaurant to celebrate. Patrick wanted to know more about Mexican food. They began their lesson for the day on poetry and Kuo taught him about meter, consonance, and assonance. They read a poem by Yeats and Kuo asked him for his favorite line. He chose one that described “blue and the dim and the dark cloths” (175). It reminded him, he said, of how the sky looks at night. Finally, they practiced memorizing the poem for an hour.

Kuo noticed that Patrick’s writing was markedly improving and that he was retaining the words he was learning from books. Though Kuo dutifully went to teach at KIPP every morning after visiting Patrick, what she really wanted was to focus on him. She wrote an email to Jordan saying that she would only be working with Patrick and was quitting the job at KIPP.

By mid-December, Kuo and Patrick started reciting poems together at the start of each session. When they recited the Yeats poem, he reminded her how to recite the line, telling her that “[t]he blue [came] before the dim,” as it did in life (179).