Theo nodded.
"And then you started writing it down."
"Ms. Pak said in science you have to have data. Or people don't believe you." Theo looked at his hands. "I was going to show you when it had enough."
"Theo. Baby. It had enough on the first page."
Theo's chin started to shake. He clamped it still. He was very good at that, Andre saw — very practiced — and it was the practice, more than anything in the notebook, that broke something loose in Andre's chest. His son was eight years old and had learned to hold his own face shut like a door.
The last entry was from that morning.
OCT 8. Dad in Dayton. L no breckfast. No dinner yesterday. V said she will eat when she learns. I don't know what she is supposed to learn. Dad comes home tonight. I am going to tell him even if I get in trubble.
Under it, pressed hard enough to dent the page, he had drawn a small check mark in advance.
Andre closed the notebook. He set it on the coffee table very gently, as though it might go off.
"Come here," he said.
Theo did not move at first. Then he did, all at once, folding against his father's side. He did not cry. He shook — a long, fine tremor, like a wire in the wind — and Andre held on and stared at the photograph of his own father on the wall and thought: I was gone. Every one of those nights, I was gone, and I came home and kissed them on the forehead in their sleep and thought, Look how peaceful.
From down the hall his mother called, "Somebody get me a towel, this child is a prune."
Theo pulled away and wiped his face fast with his sleeve, and was up and moving toward the linen closet before Andre could stop him.
V
At midnight the kids were asleep in Andre's old bedroom — Lulu in the twin bed under the Bulls pennant he had never taken down, Theo on an air mattress beside her that Gloria had dragged from the hall closet herself. Andre sat at the yellow kitchen table with a cup of coffee he did not want and his mother across from him in her housecoat, reading the notebook page by page with her glasses low on her nose.
She read every entry. She did not skip. When she finished she closed it and laid both hands on the cover, and she was quiet for a long time.