He had forty-one dollars, twenty of it Deacon Teague's. The ticket was thirty-four. He bought it from a woman behind bulletproof glass who did not look at him, and he went out and sat on the metal bench under the flickering canopy light, and seven minutes later a burgundy Buick LaCrosse pulled in beside the air pump and parked.
His grandmother got out. She was wearing a long wool coat over a blue bathrobe and house slippers. She did not have her collar on. Without it she looked smaller and older and more like somebody's grandmother, which he supposed she was. She did not grab him. She did not tell him to get in the car. She came over and sat down on the other end of the bench, and folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the highway.
"Deacon Teague's cousin works the register," she said. "She called me. This is a small town."
"I'm getting on the bus."
"You might," she agreed. "It's your thirty-four dollars."
The canopy light buzzed. A semi went past and the wind of it pushed at them both.
"I put your mother on a bus too," his grandmother said. "Different station. Jackson. September 2003. With that grey suitcase. I bought it the same morning. She'd never been on a bus by herself. She cried from the minute I told her until the minute it pulled out, and I didn't tell her why."
Malik didn't say anything. He had read the letters. He knew how she'd cried.
"Your granddaddy, Harold Pike, was a deacon at Allen Chapel and the best tenor in the district and the funniest man I ever met," Odessa said. "Sober, he was a good man. Drinking, he was a frightening one. And in 2003 he wasn't sober much. That spring he told me that if I ever tried to leave him, he'd take Clara and I'd never find her. He'd already done it once, for a day and a night. Drove her to Tunica without telling me. Bought her a funnel cake and let her play the slot machines on his lap and drove her home at four in the morning with the headlights off on the county road because he thought it was funny." She stopped. "She remembers that as the best day of her childhood. I remember it as the night I learned how to pray without words."
The bus was not here yet. Malik watched the road for it anyway.
"So I sent her to my sister Bernice in Memphis, out of his reach," his grandmother said. "And I stayed. I stayed in that house with him, and I got him into a program in Jackson, and it took eleven months and two tries. And I never told her why. Not one word. Because she loved him, and I didn't want to take her daddy from her too. Because I was ashamed I'd married a man I had to hide my child from. Because a pastor's house is supposed to be the lit window on the street, and I was too proud to have anybody see it dark. I let her think I sent her away for mouthing off. I let her think it for twenty-three years. He got sober. He stayed sober. He died sober, eight years ago, and she sat in the third pew at his funeral and cried for him and wouldn't look at me. And she never once knew there was anything to forgive him for. Only me."
"That's messed up," Malik said. His voice came out rough.
"Yes," said his grandmother. "It is."
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because you asked me a question at a bus stop at midnight, and I decided I'm done lying to children at bus stops." She turned and looked at him. "And because your mother is doing what I did. She's doing it better than I did, I think. She's doing it faster, and she called for help, which I never did. But she's making the same mistake about the telling. That's why I came out that door. I heard her about to tell you that she didn't want you. I said those words to her once, in my own way, by never saying anything. I wasn't going to stand inside and listen to them get said again."