Small as an Elephant

When Jack awakens the next morning, he’s freezing cold and decides to walk back into town to find breakfast and start looking for his mother. Realizing that he has only 50 cents left, he collects three cans off the street to redeem for an extra bit of money. He finds himself on a street filled with bed-and-breakfast homes and remembers how much his mom wanted to stay in one because it felt like living someone else’s story. Jack personally disliked the idea. He goes into the first home and asks the woman there if Becky Martel is staying there, but no such person checked in. When Jack goes back outside, the three cans he had collected are gone, and a man explains that he threw them in the recycling bin. Jack swallows hard and goes back to the bin to find them, where he discovers dozens more cans and bottles. He takes about two dollars’ worth, and then a cat jumps on the lid of the bin, crushing Jack’s pinky finger under the lid. He winces in pain but doesn’t yell or cry, and he takes the cans and bottles to the grocery store.

Jack gets almost $2 for the bottles and cans and then proceeds to the frozen food section to ice his pinky finger. He touches cold food as he goes in an attempt to numb the pain and eventually finds some trail mix and water that he can afford. He promises himself he won’t finish the trail mix, but does anyway and plans to collect more cans or bottles to get money for more food. Jack thinks his pinky is broken; the pain is like what he felt when he broke his toe a few years earlier. Jack gets the idea to send his mom a message on social media from a computer in the library, but when he arrives, it’s closed for Labor Day. Upset for a moment, Jack calms himself by imagining himself as an elephant, spraying water at his friends and relaxing on the savannah.

Jack thinks about how his life should be and knows that his family situation isn’t healthy or normal, but he also feels like only he and his mother understand it. He remembers telling his best friend, Nina, about his mother’s moods. He described it like a pinwheel that sits perfectly still when the wind doesn’t blow but spins wildly when the wind hits it. Sometimes his mother’s darker moods made her mean, and she left Jack alone until they cleared. Jack found that after he told Nina all this, she even more questions about why his mother would leave him at all, so he decided never to mention it again. While looking for his mother, he thinks about a time when she took him to the hardware store so that they could tally the appearance of colors and figure out which was the rarest. They determined that a brown-purple, which Becky named “sunken treasure” (71), was the rarest color. Ever since then, Jack has searched everywhere for it, and finding it was always like uncovering treasure.

This chapter opens with a short anecdote about a wild elephant who had injured its trunk. It sought the help of a reserve elephant, putting its trunk in the other elephant’s mouth, and the healthy elephant then broke a tree and began feeding the injured one.

Jack walks down Main Street and enters an ice cream shop, where he dares to ask for two free samples but doesn’t ask the man there if he’s seen his mother. Walking further, Jack sees a man wearing a shirt from Geddy’s, which Jack recognizes as one of his mom’s favorite bars. The man points him toward the bar, and there he meets a man named Jack. “Big Jack” and the bartender help Jack by splinting his (likely broken) finger, and Jack learns that his mother was in the bar two days ago. The bartender heard her talking to a sailor who planned to head for the Bahamas, and the bartender admits that it sounded like Becky was going to go with the sailor. Jack’s breathing halts at the thought of his mother leaving for another country. Jack hears Big Jack say “mudo” to the waitress, and Big Jack explains that it means “thank you” in Ewe, a language spoken in parts of Ghana. Before Jack leaves, the bartender offers him a cheeseburger, but Jack reluctantly refuses, thinking it best to move on. He goes to a toy and book store in search of something about elephants. Coming across a tiny plastic elephant on a shelf, he holds it in his hands and stares at it. It’s the only elephant toy, and it’s all alone just like he is. A clerk offers to check the price, but Jack knows he can’t afford it. His mind racing, as he stuffs the toy in his pocket and runs out of the store as the clerk chases after him.

Jack runs out of Bar Harbor until he finds a dirt road that leads down to a small farm. The farm appears at first glance unoccupied, so Jack sneaks into the barn. An old dog lives there but doesn’t seem to mind Jack’s company, and Jack spends the night up in the loft, which seems exciting at first. In the middle of the night, he awakens to the sounds of all sorts of bugs and other critters around him but eventually falls asleep again and awakes the next morning. He decides to search for a hose or a garden on the farm and finds a garden filled with ripe vegetables. Sneaking inside the garden, he starts eating a tomato, and moments later, a woman walks up behind him and asks what he’s doing. She tells Jack that he ate food meant for charity, but, rather than getting angry, she seems to sense that Jack might be in need himself. She offers to let him have some vegetables if he takes the rest down to the food bank. In addition, she asks that he bring back some powdered milk. Jack agrees but worries about his belongings, including the toy elephant, which are still in the barn. On the way out of the farm, he considers just taking the vegetables he has. He decides to eat just one carrot and realizes that he doesn’t know where the food bank is.