"That's not what I asked you."
He knew it wasn't. He looked at the floor. The goldfish crackers were still scattered by the table where Micah had dropped them. He thought about getting the broom and knew that if he did she would take it as running.
"The alert came in at three fifty-two," he said. "I was at Brookfield. I saw him with the ball in the little picture and I thought I should call. Then I got busy."
"You got busy."
"I watched it in the truck. On the way home."
"And then you sat out there." She still hadn't turned around. "I saw the truck, Calvin. When I was coming down the stairs, I looked out and the truck was in the driveway. How long did you sit out there?"
"Eleven minutes," he said.
Lorraine turned around.
In the stove light her face looked older than he had ever seen it, and also, strangely, like a little girl's—like the photographs in her mother's albums, the serious oldest daughter in a starched dress on the front steps in Macon, holding her baby brother on her hip and not smiling for the camera. Her eyes were swollen. She had not cried yet, he realized. She had gone all the way through that and not cried. She was holding it somewhere he couldn't see.
"Eleven minutes," she said, "while I went in my child's bag."
"I didn't know you were going to do that."
"What did you think I was going to do?"
He didn't answer. They both knew what he had thought. He had thought what he always thought: that it would be loud, and then it would be over, and Simone would go up to her room, and in a day or two the house would settle back to its normal shape, and nobody would have to say anything that couldn't be unsaid.
"How many times," Lorraine said.
"Lorraine."