"I can't run. Beatriz says if I take Jojo out of the county while Curtis's petition is pending, it looks like I'm hiding him from the court, and the judge holds it against me, and then Curtis gets weekends. Weekends." She laughed, a terrible small sound. "So I stay. I stay and I do it right and I show up to every hearing in my good blouse. But nothing in that paperwork says Malik has to stay. Malik isn't his. Malik's just the boy who called 911."
"Malik's the boy who put him away," Lucius said quietly. "That's what Curtis'll see."
"That's what Curtis wrote."
Behind them, the front door stood open a few inches where her mother had come through it and not quite pulled it shut. Neither of them looked at it.
"And you called her," Lucius said.
"I called her." Clara turned the thermos cap in her hands. "Nine years, I haven't dialed that number. I didn't even have to look it up. It's the same number. Same house. She picked up on the second ring like she'd been sitting next to the phone since 2017." She shook her head. "She didn't ask me one question. Not one. She said, 'What day?' and I said Friday, and she said, 'I'll be there by six.' That was the whole call."
"That sounds like her."
"You don't know her."
"I know her kind," Lucius said, which was the closest he ever came to arguing.
They sat. Down the block, somebody's dog barked at nothing. The radio in Lucius's lap ticked as it cooled. Clara finally drank the coffee. It was too sweet. It was exactly right.
"I'm going to sit out tonight," Lucius said. "On my side. Got a rerun of the Cardinals game and nowhere to be. You see my light on, that means I'm up."
"You don't have to do that."
"Didn't say I had to."
When she went back inside, she shut the front door and locked it and slid the chain, and then she turned around and her younger son was standing in the dark of the living room doorway in his stegosaurus shirt with his tablet held flat against his chest.
"Jojo. Baby. Were you up this whole time?"