"I don't know yet. Family thing. It's — it's my kids." Andre looked out at the flamingo in the side yard, faded almost white. "I found out something's been happening at the house while I'm on rotation. I can't go out of town anymore. Maybe not nights either. I don't know what that does to my job and I'm sorry, man, I know you're short—"
"Stop." Hector spat a seed shell; Andre could hear it. "Are the kids safe right now?"
"They're at my mother's."
"Then take the week. Take what you need. We'll talk about day shift when you know what you need. I got a guy on days who'd kill for your overtime." Another pause. "Andre. Whatever it is. You did right to come off the road."
Andre hung up and sat on his mother's porch step for a minute with the phone in his hand, because nobody had said that to him in a long time — you did right — and he did not believe it yet, but he wanted to.
Then he called Fairmount Elementary and asked for the nurse.
VI
The school nurse's office smelled of rubbing alcohol and the peppermints she kept in a jar on the counter. Patrice Dunleavy was a broad, gray-haired white woman with a lanyard full of keys and a voice like a librarian, and when Andre walked in with his cap in his hands she stood up and shook his hand and said, "Mr. Lassiter. I'm so glad you called. I was going to call you today."
Lulu's kindergarten teacher was there too — a young Black woman named Simone Hollis with cat's-eye glasses and a cardigan covered in tiny embroidered apples. She had a manila folder in her lap, and she was holding it with both hands.
"I sent three notes home," Ms. Hollis said, before he had even sat down. "September eleventh, September twenty-fifth, and last Friday. Asking for a conference. I'm guessing you never saw them."
"No, ma'am."
She nodded as if this confirmed something. She opened the folder. Inside were copies of the notes, each in her round, careful handwriting. Lulu seems very hungry in the mornings. Lulu has been taking food from classmates. I'd love to talk about snack options. Please call me at your earliest convenience. On the last one she had underlined please twice.
"The forms came back signed," Ms. Hollis said. "The tear-off slip. Signed V. Lassiter. Every time, 'Will call to schedule.' Nobody called."
Mrs. Dunleavy turned her computer monitor toward him. There was a chart on it — a curved line climbing across a grid, the kind he vaguely remembered from Lulu's baby checkups.
"This is her growth record," the nurse said. "We weigh and measure every fall. Last October she was right here, around the fiftieth percentile for weight. A nice, solid little girl. This year—" she touched the screen, "—she's dropped to about the twelfth. She's grown an inch and a half taller and lost almost three pounds. For a five-year-old, that's not a small thing. That's a child whose body is borrowing from itself."
Andre looked at the line. It went up and up and then, in the past year, it bent and fell away like a road off a cliff.