"And breakfast?"
She shook her head and looked at her knees.
The light turned green. Somebody behind him tapped a horn. Andre drove through the intersection and pulled into the first place with a lit sign, a Shell station with a little market inside, and he left the engine running and the doors locked and went in and bought everything his hands landed on: a carton of milk, two bananas, a sleeve of peanut butter crackers, a box of Cheerios, string cheese, a loaf of white bread. The kid at the register, nineteen maybe, looked at the TruClean patch and the drywall dust and the armload of breakfast food at eight o'clock at night and said nothing, and Andre was grateful to him for the rest of his life.
In the truck he handed back a banana and the crackers. Lulu took the banana in both hands and peeled it so fast the skin tore, and ate it in four bites, and held out her hand for the crackers without a word. Theo opened a sleeve for her. He did not take any himself until she had eaten three.
Andre watched it in the mirror. He watched his son wait.
"Theo. Eat, man."
"I'm okay."
"I didn't ask if you were okay."
Theo took one cracker and held it.
Andre put the truck in drive and knew, finally, where he was going.
His mother lived on Larchmont, eleven minutes away, in the same brick ranch house where Andre had grown up, with the same aluminum awning over the porch and the same plastic flamingo in the side yard that his father had put there as a joke in 1994 and that nobody had ever had the heart to remove. Gloria Lassiter was sixty-seven years old and had retired from thirty years as a cafeteria manager at Eastview Middle School, and she answered the door in a housecoat and reading glasses with the TV going behind her, and she took one look at her son's face and opened the screen without a single question.
"Mama Glo," Lulu said, and reached up.
Gloria picked her up, which she was not supposed to do with her back, and held her, and over the child's head she looked at Andre. He shook his head. Later.
"Well," Gloria said, in her cafeteria voice, the one that had moved four hundred children through a lunch line in twenty-two minutes for three decades, "I hope y'all are hungry, because I was just about to make some eggs."
She had not been about to make eggs. Andre knew she had eaten at five, as she always did. But she set Lulu down at the kitchen table, the yellow Formica one with the chrome legs, and she put on the radio, and she cracked six eggs into a bowl and put bread in the toaster and got out the grits, and the kitchen filled with butter and steam and the low sound of a gospel station, and Andre stood in the doorway with his hands hanging at his sides and could not remember how to sit down.
His mother put a plate in front of Lulu — a small spoonful of eggs, half a piece of toast. "Start there, sugar. There's more. There's a whole lot more. Nobody's going anywhere."