The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

life. Completely. “The first thing we did,” she said, “was have a cleansing of the clothes.”
Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Seven houses and four giant trash bags later she was staring at “this pile of crap. It was stuff people had given him. Most of it still had the tags on it. Stuff he would never wear. I mean there were polo shirts with little penguins on them.” For the next couple of weeks Michael slept on the Tuohys’ sofa, and no one in the family stated the obvious: this was Michael Oher’s new home, and probably would be for a long time. He was, in effect, a third child. “When I first saw him, I was like, ‘Who the heck is this big black guy?’” said Sean Junior, aged nine at the time. “But Dad just said this was a kid we were trying to help out and so I just said all right.” Sean Junior had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into his bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, “That is Sean Junior’s best friend.” “He got comfortable quickly,” said Collins Tuohy, then sixteen. “When he kept staying and staying, Mom asked him if he wanted to move in. He said, ‘I don’t think I want to leave.’ That’s when Mom went out and bought the dresser and the bed.”
After she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do—“it was ruining my ten-thousand-dollar couch”—but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or, if it did, it might collapse in the middle of the night and he and it would come hurtling through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. The day the futon arrived, she showed it to Michael and said, “That’s your bed.” And he said, “That’s my bed?” And she said, “That’s your bed.” And he just stared at it a bit and said, “This is the first time I ever had my own bed.”
That was late February 2004. Leigh Anne sat Michael down and established some rules. She didn’t care if she ever saw his mother, and didn’t need to know her problems, but he would be required to visit her. “I’m not going to have you say that I took you away from your mother. I don’t care if you don’t want to go, you’re going.” She didn’t know who his friends were from back on the west side of Memphis but they were welcome in the house and he should bring them home. Didn’t he have anyone he grew up with who he might like to bring over? He didn’t offer up any names. “Anything you wanted to know you had to pry out of him,” she said. And so she pried. “He finally mentioned someone named Craig but this Craig never materialized.”
Sean, for his part, had long since given up interest in probing into Michael’s past, or anything else. The boy had a gift for telling people as little as possible, and also for telling them what they wanted to hear. “The right answer for Michael is the answer that puts an end to the questions,” said Sean. He finally decided that Michael had not “the slightest interest in the future or the past. He’s just trying to forget about yesterday and get to tomorrow. He’s in survival mode: completely focused on the next two minutes.” He persuaded his wife to take a more detached view of the question, who is Michael Oher? and Leigh Anne agreed, at least in principle. “What does it matter if he doesn’t know the names of his brothers and sisters,” she said, unconvincingly. “Or where he went to school. Or if he went to school.”
They decided to move forward with Michael on a need-to-know basis: if they needed to know some detail about his past, she harassed Michael until he gave her an answer. If they didn’t—and mostly they didn’t—she’d leave him alone.