I.
The porch light on Delmore Street had always been the color of weak tea, and for fifteen years Malik Whitfield had believed it meant somebody was waiting up for him.
Tonight it meant his mother wanted to see his face while she did this.
The suitcase stood beside him on the boards, a big grey hard-shell thing with one wheel that clicked. He had never seen it before seven o'clock that evening, when his mother came down the attic ladder with dust on the shoulders of her cardigan and set it on his bed and said, "Pack everything you'd be sad to lose." Not pack for a weekend. Not pack for a trip. Everything you'd be sad to lose. He had stood in the middle of his room holding a phone charger like it was a question somebody had asked him in a language he didn't speak.
Now the suitcase was full and zipped, and he was holding the handle because his hand did not know what else to hold.
"It's time to go," Clara said.
She stood with her back to the closed front door, arms folded inside the heavy dark cardigan she wore when the gas bill was high and the thermostat stayed at sixty-four. Under it was the olive top she wore to work at the pharmacy, the one with a faint pen mark on the hem. Her curls were pulled up and coming loose. Her eyes were wet. She did not blink, and the wet did not fall, and Malik understood, in some part of himself that was still twelve years old, that she was holding it there on purpose.
"You're leaving with her."
Her. The woman inside the house. His grandmother, apparently. A woman he could remember meeting exactly once, at a funeral when he was seven: a church with red carpet, a lady in a black robe who put her hand on top of his head like she was checking it for fever, and then his mother pulling him out to the car before anyone could hand him a plate of food.
"Mom, please." It came out of him cracked down the middle. He was crying and he hated it, the hot stupid wet of it, fifteen years old and five-foot-eleven and crying on the front porch where Mr. Grant across the street could see if he was still out there with his radio. "Please. Don't do this. Whatever I did—"
"You didn't do anything."
"Then why?"
"Because I said so."
She had never said that to him. Not once in his life. She said it to Jojo, who was six and wanted to know why the moon followed the car. She did not say it to Malik. Malik got reasons. Malik got the bills spread out on the kitchen table and a calculator and "here's why we're not doing the field trip, baby, look at these numbers with me." He had been her partner in reasons since he was nine.
"I'll do better," he said. "I'll come straight home. I'll watch Jojo every day, I'll do the dishes without you asking, I'll—" He didn't even know what to promise, because he didn't know what he'd broken. "Just tell me what it is."