After School Reading Lessons, Sister Athelia

She took the second-grader into the janitor’s closet and locked the door. ‘This is our little secret,’ she told him.

He was sure he was in trouble. Why else would his teacher make him stay after school?

She told him they would meet every Tuesday and Thursday. She’d taught the boy in the first grade and now in the second.

Again this year he had trouble following along as her class read out loud. He watched when the other kids turned pages hoping the pictures would give him a clue. When it was his turn, she had to show him where to pick up.

On that first afternoon after school Sister Athelia underlined the suffix of a word and told him that “t-i-o-n” is pronounced “shun.” Don’t ask why, she said, just trust me.

‘Do’ is ‘du’ except when it’s pronounced ‘da.’ ‘Ph’ is ‘f.’ And ‘ed’ sounds different at the end of some verbs. She marked sentences to show who did what to whom until he was diagramming simple passages on his own.

He squirmed when she predicted he’d be one of her best readers — all the best readers were girls. Without fail she had candy at the ready after every lesson.

When summer came, he started reading his brothers’ comic books. It took an hour to work through those first Scrooge McDuck stories but slowly he began to understand apostrophes and contractions, and how “oomph, ugh and ahem” are expressed in print.

The boy had a new teacher in the fall who wore colorful clothes and had pretty hair. Miss Anne pulled him aside at the end their first week to tell him how impressed she was with the way he read.

At just the right time Sister Athelia had quietly come to the rescue of another second-grader who became a lifelong reader. He didn’t know to thank her for what she’d done.