There was a pause on the line, and in it Yolanda heard the television, the morning game show her mother pretended not to watch.
"I knew he had a project," Mama Ruth said carefully. "About the basketballs. He did half of it in my basement, with that girl. Priya. They dropped balls off my stairs for two Saturdays and wrote everything down in a notebook. I thought you knew."
"How would I know?"
"Well," said her mother, "he lives with you."
Yolanda put her forehead against her knee.
"He brought a paper home this morning," she said. "Highest score in his grade. He ran back from the bus stop to show me. And I put it down in a puddle of milk and told him to be ready for his brother's game. And then a man from the district showed up on my porch in a suit, Mama. To tell me. Because I didn't sign the form. Twice."
The game show audience on the other end of the line applauded something. Mama Ruth turned the volume down.
"Mm," she said.
"Don't *mm* me."
"I'm not *mm*-ing you. I'm thinking." Another pause. "What did Emmett do?"
"He asked if it mattered now." Yolanda's voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it, and she pressed the heel of her hand to her eye. "Then he went to school with Priya's mother. He was so polite to the man, Mama. He said thank you. He was so polite."
"He gets that from you."
"That's not funny."
"I'm not laughing." Mama Ruth exhaled, long, the sound of an old woman deciding something. "You want me to tell you it's fine? I can tell you it's fine. I've been telling you things are fine since you were four years old, and you know I'm a liar."
Yolanda did not answer. On the landing below, a door opened and closed, footsteps, then quiet.
"You know what you used to tell me," her mother said, "when you were his age? When your brother had his track meets and I'd drag you to them and you'd sit in the bleachers with your library book? You'd say, 'It's fine, Mama, I don't need anybody to come to mine.' Spelling bee. That science thing with the potatoes. Honor roll breakfast. 'It's fine, Mama. Calvin needs you more.' And God help me, I believed you, because it was easier, and because Calvin did need me, he was always one bad weekend from trouble, and you were the one who was never any trouble at all."
Yolanda remembered the potatoes. Seventh grade. A battery made of potatoes and copper wire and galvanized nails that lit a tiny red bulb. She had placed second in the school and gone on to the county fair and stood by her table in the cafeteria of a different school for four hours while other children's parents came and went and pointed and took pictures. Mama Ruth had been at a meet in Dellmont where Calvin ran the four hundred and false-started and was disqualified and cried in the car the whole way home. Yolanda had taken the bus. She had carried the potatoes home in a shoebox. They had sprouted in the garage that spring, white tendrils pushing out through the cardboard, and she had thrown them away without telling anybody.