Clara's jaw moved. For one second, he thought she was going to tell him. He watched it come up into her mouth and watched her swallow it back down like a pill without water.
"I can't do this anymore, Malik," she said. "I can't have you here. I need you gone."
The words went into him slowly, the way cold water goes into a shoe.
Past her shoulder, through the narrow pane of glass beside the door, he could see into the hallway. The light was off in there, but the kitchen light was on behind it, and in that thin yellow he could make out his little brother. Josiah. Jojo. Barefoot, in the grey-and-white striped shirt he'd worn three days in a row because it had a stegosaurus pocket. He was half-hidden behind the doorframe of the living room, pressed against it, clutching his tablet to his chest in the thick black rubber case that Malik had bought him with a whole summer of cutting Mr. Grant's grass and Miss Pearl's grass and the church lot on Fenner Road. Jojo's eyes were huge. He looked like he was watching a house fire.
Malik lifted his free hand toward the glass. Jojo shrank back.
"Mom," Malik said. "Mom, look at him. He's scared."
"He'll be fine."
"How is he going to be fine? Who's going to—" Get him from school when you work late. Read the dinosaur book with the voices. Check the closet. "Who's going to do it?"
"I am," Clara said. "I'm his mother. And I'm yours. And I'm telling you it's time."
The front door opened.
It opened the way doors open in churches, fully and without apology, and the woman who stepped out filled it. She was not tall. She was maybe Clara's height, maybe less, with short grey hair cut close to her head and a black skirt suit that looked older than Malik and better kept than anything he owned. A white clerical collar sat at her throat like a small bright door of its own. She walked out onto the porch and placed herself between the two of them, her back to Malik and her face to her daughter, and the air on the porch rearranged itself around her.
"That's enough, Clara," said the Reverend Odessa Pike. "He's coming with me."
Clara looked at her mother. Malik had seen his mother look at a lot of people. Landlords. The man at the transmission place. The judge, three years ago, from the third row of a courtroom. He had never seen her look at anybody like this, like the person in front of her was both the wall she'd been bracing against and the only thing that would hold her up if she fell.
Clara's eyes went down to the grey suitcase. Then back up.
"You recognize it," she said.
"I bought it," said his grandmother.