"No."
"He walked across the street and knocked on Mr. Pruitt's door. Didn't say a word to the police at first. Knocked on the door, and when Mr. Pruitt answered, your father said, Walt, next time you see something in my driveway that you don't understand, you come over and you ask me. You come ask first. And then he went and told the police the boy was carrying the toolbox because he asked him to." She set the cup down. "You were standing in the yard. You saw the whole thing. You were seven."
Curtis said nothing.
"I always thought you'd remember that," his mother said. "I always thought that was the kind of thing a boy remembers. Instead you remembered Philadelphia."
He flinched. He could not help it.
"You've told that story so many times, Curtis. At Christmas. At your wedding. I used to watch you tell it and I used to think, that's not what happened, that's not the story he told us the week it happened. The week it happened, you called home from the dormitory and you said a skinny little boy took Kristen's purse, and you said he couldn't have been more than fourteen, and you said the police kept stopping every Black kid on Lancaster Avenue for a month and you felt sick about it, because you'd told them you got a good look, and you hadn't. That's what you told your father. On the phone. I was on the kitchen extension."
He sat very still.
He had forgotten that. Or not forgotten. Buried. He had buried it under two hundred retellings, and each telling had been a shovelful of dirt, and the boy in the story had grown older and bigger with every shovelful, until there was nobody left under there at all except a monster that justified everything.
"I don't remember saying that," he said, and his voice cracked like a teenager's.
"I know you don't," said his mother. "That's what frightens me."
The plane flew on. After a while she reached over and took his hand, and held it, not tenderly exactly, but firmly, the way you hold the hand of a child at a crosswalk.
"Your father would have asked first," she said. "That's all. That's the whole thing. He would have asked."
* * *