Simone looked at the ball. SIMONE W. in her own nine-year-old handwriting, a little faded now, a scuff across the W where it had hit the shelf.
"Garage," she said. "In the bin."
"You want to play again sometime? The rec league runs in January. Thursday nights." He turned the ball in his hands. "I could drive."
She looked at him. He was looking at the ball, not at her. She thought about the truck sitting in the driveway with its engine ticking. She thought about the soda from the gas station, and the lock on her door, and *I'm not going to do it anymore.* She thought you could not know, yet, which of those things a person meant.
"Maybe," she said.
He nodded. He put the ball under his arm. "I'll wait till the bus comes."
"You don't have to."
"I know," he said, and walked to the end of the driveway with her, and stood there in the cold with the ball under his arm and his hands in his jacket pockets, and didn't say anything else, and didn't leave.
The bus came at seven-fifty-two. Simone climbed on and took a seat by the window near the back, and set her backpack on her lap, and put both hands flat on top of it. Through the glass she saw her father lift one hand, and she didn't wave back, but she didn't look away either until the bus turned the corner.
Behind her father, through the front window of the house, she could see the empty place on the shelf where the light came in.
Nothing was fixed. She knew that. Tonight her mother would call Micah baby, probably, and catch herself, or not. Micah would get the first pancake on Saturday. Something would break, someday, a glass or a plate or a promise, and everybody in the house would look at Simone first. Maybe a little slower than before. Maybe not. She didn't know yet. She was eleven, and she had stopped believing a long time ago that one bad night could make a family into a different family.
But the money was in the front pocket, and the front pocket was zipped, and the backpack was on her lap, and nobody was going to open it but her.
The bus rumbled down Larkspur Drive. Simone leaned her forehead against the cold window and, under her breath, so low that the girl in the seat across the aisle didn't even look over, she hummed the alto line from choir. It went up a little and came down and reached the place where it always slipped.
She stopped there. And then, without trying, she heard it, the next note, a half step down, plain as if somebody had played it on a piano in a front room a long way south of here.
She sang it. Nobody noticed. That was all right. It was the part nobody was supposed to notice. It held everything else up anyway.