On Tuesdays the bus let Simone off at the corner of Larkspur Drive at ten past five instead of twenty past four, because Tuesdays were choir, and choir ran long whenever Sister Agnes was unhappy with the altos. Sister Agnes had been unhappy with the altos all fall. Simone was an alto. She walked the half block home with the line they had been drilling still turning over in her mouth, the low part under the melody that nobody in the pews would ever notice was there, and she was thinking that if she had a keyboard at home she could pick it out note by note until it stopped slipping.
She had one hundred and eighty-six dollars toward the keyboard. She knew the number the way other kids knew their locker combinations. The one she wanted was used, listed by a man two towns over who said it had weighted keys and a sustain pedal and only one dead note, the high B-flat, which you could live without. It cost two hundred and forty. She was fifty-four dollars away, which was nine more Saturdays of feeding Mrs. Delacroix's cats while Mrs. Delacroix visited her sister in Toledo, or one birthday, or one very good Christmas.
The front door was unlocked. It usually was when her mother was home. Simone stepped into the entryway, pushed the door shut with her hip, and stopped.
The living room was the cleanest room in the house. It was the room her mother had painted herself, a gray so pale it was almost white, with brighter white along the baseboards and around the windows, and it held the big gray sofa nobody was allowed to eat on and the glass table nobody was allowed to put cups on without a coaster and, on the low shelf beside the window, in the spot where the afternoon light came in, Grandma Hattie's vase.
The vase was on the floor. It was in more pieces than Simone could count from the doorway. A curved white section the size of a hand lay rocking very slightly on the rug, as if it had only just stopped. Smaller pieces had skittered across the hardwood toward the sofa, and there was white dust, fine as flour, in a fan shape near the shelf. Next to the biggest piece, resting against the leg of the end table like it had rolled there and gotten tired, was an orange basketball.
Her basketball. She could see her own handwriting on it from where she stood, the black Sharpie letters she had written the week she joined the rec league two winters ago: SIMONE W. The league had lasted one season. Practices were Thursday evenings across town, and her mother had said, after the fourth Thursday, that she could not keep doing that drive with Micah melting down in the back seat, and that was that. The ball had lived in the garage ever since, in the bin with the bike helmets.
Simone did not move. Some part of her understood, before any other part did, that whatever she did next was going to be the wrong thing. If she knelt to pick up the pieces, she would be the girl kneeling over the pieces. If she backed out the door, she would be the girl who ran. So she stood with her backpack straps still in both fists and the alto line gone completely out of her head.
From the far end of the room, past the sofa, came a small crunching sound.
Micah was at the table by the kitchen pass-through, sitting on his knees on the chair the way he wasn't supposed to, eating goldfish crackers out of the bag. He was seven. He had on his light blue polo from school with the little crest on the pocket, and there was orange cracker dust on the crest. When he saw her see him, he went still for one second. Then he ate another cracker.
"Micah," Simone said. Very quietly. "What happened?"
He shrugged. He looked at the bag.
Upstairs, a door opened. Simone heard her mother's voice on the landing, the bright professional voice she used for work calls, saying "Perfect, I'll send that over tonight, thanks so much," and then the voice dropping to its real register, tired, as she came down the stairs. "Micah, baby, did you eat something besides crackers? Because I told Aunt Bernadette—"
Her mother reached the bottom step and saw the floor.
Lorraine Whitaker did not scream. Simone almost wished she had. Her mother stood with one hand on the banister and the other still holding her phone, in her fitted tan top with the long sleeves she pushed up when she was working, her pearl earrings, her hair pulled back so tight into its bun that it seemed to lift her eyebrows. She looked at the shelf. She looked at the floor. She made a sound that was not a word, a small sound like something being let out of her, and Simone watched her face go from gray to something worse.
Then her mother looked up, and the first thing she saw after the vase was Simone, standing over it in her school uniform with her backpack on.