Isaiah Vaughn is 5 years old, deaf and doesn’t understand much of what his mother says.

So he was terrified a few days after Thanksgiving, when she packed his stuff at their Charlotte home, drove two hours east to Morganton, and left him in the care of the N.C. School for the Deaf.

“When I was putting his clothes in the car, he cried and shouted, because he felt I was giving him away,” said his mom, Cassandra Ware.

“He just doesn’t understand that I’m trying to get him the education he needs. And I couldn’t tell him because I don’t know sign language. All I could do was keep hugging him and crying.”

Isaiah now understands that he can come home weekends, but his faith in his mother has been rocked.

She hopes that will change on Christmas morning.

Santa is going to shower the boy with as much attention as the divorced mom can afford on her salary as a warehouse material handler.

The Salvation Army is going to help with toys from its Christmas Bureau, an annual program that provides gifts to thousands of impoverished children. Money for the gifts comes through efforts like the Observer’s Empty Stocking Fund.

Her son’s big Christmas wish: A bike.

“The hard part is that all this is happening right before Christmas. I had to use a lot of money to buy what he needed for school, so there’s not much left,” said Ware, noting her salary is just over the limit to qualify for programs like food stamps. “I make an honest living, but I’m like a lot of single moms. It’s paycheck to paycheck.”

Isaiah, who was born deaf in both ears, is the younger of her two sons, the other being a healthy 16-year-old named Malik.

The decision to send Isaiah to a special school came after Ware concluded he needed more help than could be provided by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. “I knew I’d made the right choice on the first day, when we got to the school and a bunch of children ran up and grabbed his hand, all of them doing sign language.”

He speaks sign language since he was a year old, but she says that’s not enough. Her dream is that he’ll learn how to better communicate with the rest of the world, and find a way to survive on his own. “I won’t always be there to help him and he has to be ready,” she said.

Still, these three weeks without him around the house have been a tough, partly because they can’t talk on the phone, she said.

Ware cried for days after dropping him off. “And I’d wake up at night imagining that he was thinking: ‘I’ll never see my mom again. She left me’.”

He’ll eventually get over this, she believes, and he may even forget about that first night, when she waited until he was asleep to drive off.

“I know he’s seeing all the Christmas lights and wondering if he’ll be home at Christmas,” she said. “I want him to wake up that morning and find all those gifts under the tree just like all those years before. And he’ll know: ‘Mama didn’t forget about me’.”