"Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, leave it on the table for Mom."
She looked at him for a long second with her spoon in the air, measuring something, and he made his face as plain as he could make it. She was seven, but she wasn't stupid. Then she nodded and went back to eating, and he went into the front room to get his backpack.
It was hanging on the nail by the door, where it always hung. It wasn't really a backpack, not the kind the other kids had, the JanSports in red and navy blue with the leather patch on the bottom. It was an old green canvas knapsack, army surplus, from some war nobody remembered, with two straps and a flap that closed with a brass buckle. The buckle on the left had broken years ago, before Cal could remember, and someone had tied the strap through it with a thin brown leather shoelace, cracked and darkened with age. Inside the flap, in faded ballpoint, someone had written D.D. His mother's initials. Darlene Dunn. She had carried it when she was a girl, before Cal, before Rosie, before Rosie's father came and went. He didn't know much more than that, and when he'd asked once, she'd said, "It went a lot of places," and then changed the subject.
He packed it: his math book, his spelling folder, the library book that was a week overdue that he kept meaning to return, a peanut butter sandwich in a bread bag, a pencil worn to two inches. Then he took it off the nail and slung it over one shoulder, which was the way you wore it if you didn't want anyone to look too closely at the shoelace.
The door opened while he was buttoning Rosie's coat.
His mother came in with the cold on her. She was wearing her navy work smock under her car coat, and her face had that gray, scrubbed look it got after a night shift, like a window someone had wiped with a dry rag. She cleaned offices in the Gulf Tower downtown from ten at night until six in the morning, thirty-one floors of carpet and wastebaskets and ashtrays and the long sinks in the bathrooms, and then three afternoons a week she worked the counter at the Coin-Op on Penn Avenue, making change and folding other people's sheets. In between she slept.
"Hey, baby," she said to Rosie, and kissed her on the head, and then she looked at the oven door standing open and then she looked at Cal.
"It was cold," he said.
"I know it was cold." She shut the oven door with her knee and turned off the knob. "Gas costs money too."
"I know."
"I know you know." She put her hand on the back of his neck for a second. Her fingers smelled like the pink soap from the Gulf Tower bathrooms, and underneath that, bleach. "You ate?"
"Yeah."