At eight-thirty she went up to put Micah to bed and found him already asleep in his pajamas, his face swollen, his rocket lamp still turning. Calvin had done it. She stood in the doorway and watched her son sleep, and for the first time since he was born, she did not feel that clean, uncomplicated rush of tenderness she always felt looking at him. What she felt was more crowded than that. Tenderness was there. So was something else, something cold and new and frightened. She didn't love him less. She thought, standing there, that she would have liked it better if she did, because then at least it would be simple. She loved him exactly as much, and she had seen his foot move on that screen, and both of those things were going to be true for the rest of her life.
At nine she went and stood outside Simone's door.
She did not knock. She stood in the hallway with her cut thumb wrapped in a paper towel and listened. There was a line of light under the door. There was no sound. And then, so faint Lorraine thought at first she was imagining it, there was humming. Low. A line Lorraine didn't recognize, something from choir, a part that wasn't the melody. It went up a little and came back down and stopped, and started again, and stopped in the same place, as if the singer couldn't find the next note.
Lorraine knew the next note. She didn't know the song, but she knew where it was going; she had grown up in Hattie's front room, she had the ear too, she had just never done anything with it. The next note was a half step down. She could hear it in her head as clearly as if someone had played it on the piano.
She opened her mouth.
She closed it again. She didn't have the right. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time.
She went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table in the dark, and finally, at nine-fifteen on a Tuesday night, with nobody watching, she cried for her mother—for the vase, for the piano bench in Macon, for every B-plus and every cookie tin and every time she had been the one who should have known better. And she cried, too, for the girl upstairs who had been made to stand in exactly that place. Because Lorraine had put her there. Knowing exactly what that place felt like, she had put her daughter in it anyway, year after year, and nobody had made her. She could not even give that one to her mother.
***
In the morning there was an index card on the refrigerator, held up by the magnet shaped like a peach that Grandma Hattie had sent from Georgia one Christmas. The handwriting was her father's, square capital letters in carpenter's pencil:
NO BALLS IN THE HOUSE. ANY KIND. ANYBODY.
Simone read it standing in her socks with her backpack already on. She had slept in fits and woken before her alarm and gotten dressed in the half dark, white shirt, navy jumper, tie knotted twice because the first time it came out crooked. Above the card, on top of the refrigerator, she could see the end of a shoebox. She knew what was in it without asking.
Her mother was at the stove. She was making pancakes, which she did on Saturdays, not on Wednesdays, and she was wearing yesterday's slacks and an old sweatshirt and no earrings, and there was a bandage around her left thumb. She turned when Simone came in, and Simone saw that her eyes were puffy and that she had not put on any makeup, and that she was looking at Simone as if Simone were something she was afraid of breaking.
"Morning," her mother said.
"Morning."
"There's pancakes."