"Clara's boy," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'm Mother Philippa Moss. I've known your mama since she was in a christening gown that was too long for her. She kicked the whole time the Reverend held her. Kicked the water right out the font." She tapped his arm with one finger. "She sang alto in the youth choir. Better than the sopranos, and she knew it. You know what she used to do?"
"No, ma'am."
"Hid comic books in her hymnal. Spider-Man. Right in the middle of 'Blessed Assurance,' she'd be reading about Spider-Man." Mother Moss's face folded up into a smile that went all the way back. "Your grandmother caught her every single time and never once said a word about it in front of anybody. Took her aside after. Every single time." She patted him again. "You eat. You're too thin. Clara was too thin at your age too."
Saturday, at the fish fry, Deacon Ambrose Teague put him to work. Deacon Teague was sixty and built like a refrigerator and ran the church food pantry out of the basement on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He did not say much. He handed Malik a pair of tongs and pointed at a fryer and said, "Don't let it get darker than my hand," and then went off to argue with a propane tank. Malik fried catfish for four hours. Nobody asked him why he was in Cedar Bluff. A woman with a baby on her hip told him it was the best fish she'd had since her husband passed. At the end of the day, Deacon Teague folded a twenty-dollar bill into his palm and said, "Tuesday. Pantry. Four o'clock. You lift boxes, I'll pay you," and left before Malik could say no.
He was beginning, horribly, to be able to stand it. That was what frightened him. That he might get used to this, the blinking yellow light and the grits under a paper towel and the old women who knew things about his mother, and that she would let him. That she wanted him to.
He texted her Sunday night: are u mad at me. just tell me if u r.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared. Disappeared.
Eat, she wrote, finally. And then, a minute later: No.
That night he couldn't sleep, and around midnight he opened the closet in his mother's old room looking for an extra blanket. There wasn't one. What there was, on the top shelf behind a stack of folded choir robes, was a Nike shoebox held shut with two thick rubber bands.
He knew he shouldn't. He took it down anyway.
Inside were letters, maybe forty of them, in envelopes addressed in purple gel pen to Rev. Odessa Pike, 14 Chapel Hill Road, Cedar Bluff. The return address on every one said c/o Bernice Toller, then a street in Memphis. They were postmarked across one year: September 2003 to August 2004. Every envelope had been slit neatly at the top with a letter opener. Every one had been read so many times the folds had gone soft as cloth.
He opened the first one. His mother's handwriting at fifteen was round and big and slanted hard to the right, like it was running somewhere.
Mama. Aunt Bernice is fine. The school is big. I don't know anybody. I said I was sorry. I said I would stop talking back and stop asking about Daddy and stop going to Kiara's after choir. I said it in the car and you didn't say anything. What did I do? Please just tell me what I did and I'll fix it. Please let me come home for Thanksgiving. Your daughter, Clara.