He walked out of Cedar Bluff High School at 12:40 in the afternoon without signing out, up Chapel Hill Road in the sun, and found his grandmother in the empty sanctuary of Allen Chapel, standing at the pulpit with reading glasses on, saying a sentence out loud to the pews and then crossing it out.
"Is Curtis out?" he said from the back.
She took the glasses off. She did not ask why he wasn't at school.
"Yes," she said.
"And you knew."
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Your mother called me nine days ago. He'd been out a week and a half by then."
He came down the center aisle. The red carpet was worn pale in a path down the middle, from a hundred years of feet. "She sent me away," he said, "and she kept Jojo there. With him out. With him driving around asking my friends where I'm at." His voice was rising and he let it. "Who's standing in the kitchen? Huh? Who's going to stand there? She's by herself. She's by herself with a six-year-old and a broke wrist that still clicks when it rains, and I'm up here frying fish!"
"I know you're angry—"
"You don't know anything about me! You met me one time!"
"That's true," his grandmother said.
"I'm going home."
"No," she said. "You're not."
He did not argue anymore. He went back to the parsonage and lay on his mother's bed and looked at the ceiling until it got dark, and ate the dinner she left outside his door, and at 11:10 that night he put his backpack on and walked a mile and a half down Highway 9 in the dark to the Pilot station where the Trailways bus stopped at 11:50 on its way south.