He shook his head. Then he nodded. Then he shook it again.
She knelt down in front of him. His feet were cold on the floorboards; she cupped one in her hand and it was like holding a stone from a creek.
"Malik's going to stay with Grandma Odessa for a little while," she said. "Up in Cedar Bluff. Where Mommy grew up. There's a big church and a little house and a lady who makes the best pound cake in the state, I promise you. He's going to be fine."
Jojo looked at her. He had Curtis's eyes, long-lashed and dark, and she had spent three years teaching herself not to flinch at that, and she did not flinch now.
"Is it because of me?" he whispered.
"What? No. No, baby." She pulled him in. The tablet's rubber case pressed into her collarbone. "Nothing about this is because of you. You hear me? Nothing."
He did not say anything. He was very still against her, the way small animals are still when they are hoping the thing above them will pass.
She carried him upstairs and put him in his bed and lay down beside him on top of the covers, the way she had when he was three and woke every night screaming without knowing why. He fell asleep with the tablet under his pillow. She fell asleep with her hand on his back. At some point near two in the morning she woke and went downstairs and took the letter out of the cereal cabinet, where she had hidden it behind the Raisin Bran, and read it again at the kitchen table.
It was one page of lined paper. The handwriting was neat. Curtis had always had nice handwriting; it was one of the things she'd liked about him, at the start, the birthday card with the careful loops.
Clara. I am a changed man and I have done my time. I am filing to see my son like any father has a right to. Tell Malik I hold no grudge. Tell him I will be seeing him. A man and his little brother's daddy ought to talk face to face. — C.
That was all. No threat a lawyer could hold up in a courtroom and shake. She knew, because she had shown it to Beatriz Ocampo, and Beatriz had read it twice with her mouth pressed tight and said, "I believe you completely. And a judge will say it's a man asking to see his son."
Three years ago, in this kitchen, Curtis Lyle had taken her by the wrist and brought it down on the edge of the counter, right there, by the toaster, and the sound it made was a sound she still heard sometimes when people snapped green beans. Jojo had been three and asleep upstairs. Malik had been twelve and in the doorway with her phone in his hand, saying their address to a dispatcher in a voice so calm it frightened her more than anything Curtis did. Then Malik had put the phone down on the floor, still connected, and stepped between them, and stood there. Just stood there, a skinny boy in basketball shorts, until the blue lights came. When the officers walked Curtis out past him, Curtis had looked at Malik and said, "I'll remember you." At the trial, Malik had testified for forty minutes without crying, and the sentence was four years, and Curtis served thirty-four months.
Clara folded the letter, put it back behind the Raisin Bran, and sat in the kitchen with the light off until the sky over Delmore Street went grey. Across the street, Lucius Grant's porch light burned all night.
IV.
He woke at 5:10 the first morning because the house was making a sound he didn't recognize.