Quincy looked at him a long time. Then he took off his headset with the side of his wrist, and backed the chair away from the table with the joystick, and turned it, and rolled down the hall and out the front door onto the ramp Alton had built of treated lumber seven years ago, and stopped at the top of it.
The van sat in the driveway in the porch light. Alton pressed the button on the fob. The sliding door opened, and the van sighed and knelt, and the floor parted and the ramp came out from under it and unfolded and touched the concrete.
Quincy did not say anything for a while.
"Is that—" he said. And then stopped. And then, in a different voice, "How?"
"Fridays," Alton said.
His son rolled down the wooden ramp and across the driveway and stopped at the foot of the aluminum one and looked up into the van. Then he found the switch inside the door at hand height, the one Thuy Phan had told him about, and pressed it with the side of his hand, and the ramp folded up, and he pressed it again, and it came back down, and he did that three times, and on the third time Alton saw that he was crying, the way he cried now, without his face moving much at all, and Alton looked away down the street to give him that.
Quincy rolled up into the van and forward to the front and the docking plate caught the bracket under his chair with a click. They ate the chicken in the driveway with the doors open and the dome light on, Alton in the driver's seat and Quincy beside him, Alton holding the box and the biscuits and the long straw for the sweet tea. Then Alton told him about Hollis Street. All of it. The keys, the four words, the curb, the wrecker, the shoe. He had decided in the Popeyes line to tell all of it; he had spent seven years being careful with his son, and it had not made anything better.
Quincy listened. When Alton was finished he said, "Ten-twenty-eight is a registration check."
"Is it."
"Page thirty-six." He was quiet. "Did he say four-twelve? That was his unit?"