The house was clean in the way of a person who lived alone and did not trust herself to stop once she started. There were plastic runners on the hall carpet. There was a framed print of a Black Jesus on the wall and, next to it, a framed photograph of a much younger Reverend Pike shaking hands with a bishop. There was a smell of Pine-Sol and something baked.
She led him down the hall and opened a door.
"This was your mother's," she said.
The room had a twin bed with a quilt pieced from old blue and yellow dresses. A desk. A sun-faded poster of Aaliyah over the bed, the corners held with yellowed tape. A bulletin board with ribbons on it from something called the District Oratorical Contest. A shelf of paperbacks. Everything was dusted. The sheets on the bed were new; he could see the fold creases.
"You made the bed," he said.
"This afternoon."
So she'd known this afternoon. So his mother had known before that. So everybody had known except him. He set his backpack down on the floor.
"You never changed it," he said, looking at the poster. "Her room."
"Not because I'm sentimental," his grandmother said. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame. "Because I didn't know what she'd want. I've had twenty-three years to decide, and I never could." She looked at him a long moment. "There's a towel on the end of the bed. Bathroom's across the hall. I get up at five, but you don't have to. Breakfast is at seven. School's Monday; I've already talked to the principal. Her mother was in my youth choir."
"I didn't say I was going to school here."
"No," she agreed. "You didn't."
She went to close the door, and stopped.
"Malik," she said. It was the first time she'd said his name. She said it carefully, like it was a word in a language she was still learning. "Nobody in this house is going to lie to you. If I can't tell you something, I'll say I can't. But I won't lie."
He didn't answer. She closed the door.
He sat on the edge of his mother's childhood bed with the hoodie still on and his shoes still on and looked at Aaliyah, who looked back at him with her sunglasses and her half smile, and he waited for the crying to come again. It didn't. What came instead was a kind of empty, ringing quiet, like the inside of a bell after somebody stops hitting it.