"And I just did it to my son."
"You did it for eight days," her mother said. "I did it for twenty-three years. Let me be the worse one. I've earned it."
"Don't." Clara's eyes were burning. "Don't do that. Don't take all of it so there's nothing left for me to be mad at. You don't get to be humble at me tonight. You've been humble at a whole congregation. I just want you to be wrong."
Odessa was quiet. Then, in a voice Clara had not heard since she was a small girl in a too-long christening gown in old photographs, she said, "I was wrong, Clara. I was wrong."
Neither of them said anything after that. The coffee went cold. At one-thirty, Odessa stood and pushed the white box an inch across the table toward her daughter.
"May I pray for you?" she said.
Clara looked at her. "You can do it in your room," she said. "I'll know you're doing it."
Something moved at the corner of Odessa's mouth. She went down the hall. Clara sat alone at her mother's kitchen table and did not open either box. But in the morning, when Lucius carried the bags to the Lincoln, the white box was on the floor of the back seat, under Clara's feet.
She came to the eleven o'clock service, and sat in the last pew, and Mother Moss slid in next to her with her cane and patted her knee and said nothing at all. Odessa had been working all week on a sermon about the Prodigal Son. She did not preach it. She preached instead, for nineteen minutes, about Miriam: the sister who stood far off in the reeds to see what would be done to her baby brother, after their mother set him adrift to save his life. "The child who watches is not a footnote," she said. "The child who watches is how the story gets told." Jojo, in the pew between his brother and his mother, sat up very straight. Clara left during the last hymn. But she took the bulletin.
Malik stayed. It was his idea. Beatriz said the twenty-seventh was sixteen days off, and Curtis was in county, and nothing was over until a judge said it was. Malik said he'd come home after. "This time," he told his mother at the Lincoln's window, "I'm choosing it."
IX.
On the twenty-seventh, Malik sat in the third row of Courtroom 4B between his mother and his grandmother, in a borrowed blazer of Deacon Teague's son's that was too big in the shoulders.
He did not testify. Beatriz Ocampo, a compact woman in a burgundy suit with a rolling file cart she steered like a shopping basket, had told him on the phone the week before that he didn't need to. "The messages speak," she said. "Your brother already did the testifying. You just come and sit."
Curtis Lyle came in through the side door in county orange. He looked smaller than Malik remembered, and older, and when his eyes went across the gallery and found Malik, he smiled the same smile Tariq had described at the Shell.
Malik did not look away. He did not stand up, either. He felt his mother's hand find his on one side, and on the other, his grandmother's shoulder settle against his, solid as a pew. He had spent three years believing that if that man ever came back, he would have to be standing in a doorway. Instead, all he had to do was sit.