The breathing went on. The stars went around.
"I thought she'd just get yelled at," Micah said finally. "She always gets yelled at, and then she goes to her room, and then it's over. It's always over by dinner." He sniffed hard. "If it was me, Mommy would be sad. When it's Simone, Mommy's just mad. Mad is faster."
Calvin sat with that for a long time. His son said it the way he'd say the sky was blue. There was no meanness in it. That was the worst thing. It was a seven-year-old's arithmetic, worked out over years of watching, and the answer it had given him was simple: sad was worse than mad, and his sister was where mad went.
"It's not over by dinner for her," Calvin said. "You know that? It doesn't get over for her. It just goes to her room with her."
Micah didn't answer.
"She's been carrying her money to school every day," Calvin said, "because you took seven dollars out of her closet. Did you know that?"
A very small nod against the pillow.
"Tomorrow," Calvin said, "you and me are going to talk about what you owe her. Not for the vase. Your grandma's vase can't be paid for. For the rest of it." He kept his hand where it was. "Tonight you're going to put on your pajamas and brush your teeth and go to sleep. And you're going to think about what it felt like when you saw the camera. Okay? You're going to remember what that felt like."
"It felt bad," Micah whispered.
"Yeah," Calvin said. "That's how she feels most days."
***
Lorraine put the pieces in a shoebox.
It was a box from a pair of church shoes she had bought for the funeral and worn exactly once. She had found it on the top shelf of the hall closet and emptied out the tissue paper and laid the pieces in it, the big curved one on the bottom and the smaller ones around it like a nest, and then she had crawled across the floor on her hands and knees with a flashlight finding the slivers that had gotten under the sofa. She had cut her thumb on one. It had bled a little onto the tissue paper. She hadn't noticed until later.
The dust she swept up last, with a hand broom, into a sandwich bag. She didn't know why she kept the dust. She put the sandwich bag into the shoebox with the rest.
She set the shoebox on the shelf by the window, where the vase had been. Then she took it down again, because she couldn't look at it there. She put it on top of the refrigerator, where Micah couldn't reach.