Mark tragically dies soon after, and Jennings spends months alone in the home until his brother picks him up. Jennings is sent to another home where he meets Mark again, and they agree to become brothers. Sal begins to take care of the family, and things improve until one day Jennings’ mother falls down the stairs, breaking her back. When he returns home again, the family is strained to the limit, and Jennings runs away to Sal, after spending days hiding out in the zoo. Their cook, named Martha, becomes a maternal figure to Jennings, and she helps him cope with being a poor boy in a rich neighborhood. When Jennings’ mother gets pneumonia, he is sent to live with the rich Frazier family. Jennings befriends a bus driver named Sal, who grew up an orphan and who becomes a surrogate father to Jennings. Jennings returns to his dysfunctional family life, where he meets his terminally ill brother, Jerome, for the first time. A policeman brings him back, and his mother once again picks him up. There, he makes more friends, but he is beaten and dragged across a splintered wooden floor by a nun and runs away.

Jennings is held back from school for all his time in the home, and his mother gets sick, prompting his return to another children’s home. Jennings’ family is destitute, and this puts a great strain on their family unity. He is lent out to a severely abusive family at one point, where he is beaten and starved, before he makes it back to the home. At the home, Jennings experiences abuse and a precarious environment that discourages friendship, yet through his compassion he befriends children named Mark and Stacy. The main narrative begins with Jennings’ mother dropping him off at a children’s home she tells him she will be right back. The book opens at the zoo, where a grown Jennings takes care of his three children and remembers how the zoo was once a refuge for him.

They cage the animals at night