Dr. Patel looked at her strangely, the way people would look at her for a long time afterward when she told it, and then he smiled a little and said, "Well. Somebody give that cat a raise."
* * *
They let them see him at seven.
He was propped up in a bed in the pediatric wing with the oxygen tubing under his nose and an IV in the back of one hand and a tray in front of him with a carton of chocolate milk and two pieces of buttered toast, one already gone. He looked like a different child than the one on the garage floor. There was pink in his face. His hair stuck straight up. He looked at them when they came in and then looked down at his toast, and his ears, which stuck out like his father's, went red.
"Hi, Kevin," Janet said.
"Hi, Mrs. Pruitt." His voice was hoarse. He looked at Del. "Hi, Mr. Pruitt."
"Hey, sport."
"I'm sorry I ate your stuff," Kevin said, to his toast. "I was gonna pay you back. I was gonna mow your lawn all summer for free."
Janet sat down on the edge of the bed. She didn't decide to; her legs just stopped holding her.
"The Ding Dongs," she said.
"I'm really sorry."
"Honey," she said, "you can have all the Ding Dongs you want for the rest of your life."
It came out of him in pieces over the next hour, between bites of toast, while a policeman—Officer Brandt, with his red mustache—sat in a chair in the corner with his little spiral notebook, and a caseworker from Children Services named Mrs. Odom, a small brisk Black woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, stood by the window with her arms folded and her face giving away nothing.
He hadn't been trying to get to Tennessee. Everybody had been wrong about that. He'd been trying to get home.
The people in Xenia had been nice, he said; he wanted them to know that. But they weren't home, and every night he'd lain awake thinking that when his dad got out of the hospital, he'd come back to Linden Street and Kevin wouldn't be there and he wouldn't know where to find him. So he'd walked. Out the back door, twelve miles up Route 235 in the dark, hiding in the ditch whenever a car came. It had taken him all night.
When he got to his house, he couldn't get in. He'd lost the key on the shoelace somewhere in Xenia, and his dad always kept the spare in his wallet, and his dad's wallet was in Knoxville. He'd sat on his own front steps until the sky started to get light, and then he got scared someone would see him.