"You want me to call Daryl and tell him what I think of him in language the Lord will forgive me for later?"
"Not yet."
"All right." She reached across the table and covered his hand. "Then tonight you sleep. Tomorrow we figure out what a man does when the people who were supposed to be home turn out to be the storm."
Jamal did not sleep so much as endure the dark in two-hour increments. The guest-room ceiling was unfamiliar. The sheets smelled of lavender detergent. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the towel, the gold chain, Angela's forced smile, the photographs watching. He thought of the last video call from overseas, Angela's face framed in the phone, the living room behind her looking ordinary, Daryl's laugh somewhere off-camera that Jamal had assumed belonged to a sitcom. He had asked, Is someone there? and she had said, Just the TV, baby, and he had believed her because sons are trained from birth to believe their mothers when the alternative is unbearable.
Morning arrived with Rhea's radio playing gospel soft from the kitchen and the smell of bacon. Jamal showered, changed into civilian clothes from the duffel — jeans, a black T-shirt — and left the uniform hanging in the closet like a version of himself that still knew how to stand at attention for simpler orders. His phone held seventeen missed calls from Angela and four from Daryl. He did not open the messages. He ate what Rhea put in front of him because she watched him until he did.
On the third day, Angela came to Rhea's door.
Jamal heard her voice before he saw her — the low urgent murmur of sisters negotiating in a doorway, Rhea's tone firm, Angela's cracking. He stood in the hallway of the bungalow and considered walking out the back. Then he decided that running from his mother in his aunt's house was a kind of cowardice he would not add to the week's inventory.
He stepped into the living room.
Angela looked smaller than she had in the open-plan house. No cardigan now, just the olive tee and dark jeans, afro slightly flattened on one side as if she had slept wrong or not at all. Her eyes were swollen. When she saw him she made a sound that was not quite a sob and not quite his name.
"Jamal."