Through the wall, he heard his grandmother turn the baseball game back on in the kitchen, very low.
III.
Clara Whitfield stood on her porch until the Buick's taillights turned off Delmore onto Fenner and were gone, and then she stood a while longer, because she did not trust her legs to do anything else.
When they finally moved, they only took her as far as the top step. She sat down on it hard, the way you sit when a chair is pulled out from under you, and put both hands over her mouth, and the thing she had been holding in her eyes for two hours came down all at once.
She did not hear Lucius Grant cross the street. She only felt the step take his weight beside her, and smelled the Old Spice and the coffee, and heard the small radio he carried everywhere click off.
"Well," Lucius said.
He was seventy-four and had carried mail on the north side for thirty-one years, and he had a way of saying "well" that could mean anything from good morning to I'm sorry your dog died. He did not put his arm around her. He set his thermos down on the step between them and let it sit there like a third person.
"Did I do it right?" Clara said into her hands.
"You did it hard," Lucius said. "Hard ain't always the same as right. Sometimes it is."
"I told him I didn't want him." She took her hands off her face. "I said I need you gone. I said it to my baby's face, Lucius. I watched it go into him."
"I saw."
"I had to. You know I had to. If I told him—" She stopped, pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. "If I told him Curtis was out, he'd have unpacked that suitcase and sat down in the kitchen doorway and dared somebody to move him. He's done it before. He was twelve and he did it. He'd do it at fifteen and he'd do it bigger." Her voice broke on bigger. "Better he hates me. Better he hates me and he's two hours up the road sleeping in my old bed than he's here being brave."
Lucius unscrewed the thermos cap, poured, handed it to her. She held it without drinking.
"Eleven days," she said. "Curtis has been out eleven days. And that letter came to this house. To this house, Lucius. He wrote Malik's name. He wrote my baby's name in his handwriting and put a stamp on it."
"I know, sugar."