"I say it every year," Ortiz said. "Some years it costs me. I say it anyway."
Naomi's own childhood returned to her in scraps that summer, as if Isaiah's wound had opened a door onto older rooms.
She had grown up in a walk-up on the south side where the radiators clanked like arguments and the church basement choir taught her that harmony was what happened when different mouths agreed to care about the same breath. Her mother, Corinne, had worked nights and slept light. Corinne's rule was simple and unsparing: you do not leave your people in a room where they are being made small. When Naomi was nine, a corner-store clerk accused her of stealing candy she had not touched. Corinne walked her back into the store, asked for the manager, and stood until the apology came out sideways and insufficient and still spoken. On the walk home, Corinne bought Naomi the candy and then made her share it with the neighbor kids because dignity, Corinne said, was not the same as spite.
Corinne had died the year Isaiah turned six—cancer that moved fast and taught Naomi the administrative violence of hospitals, the forms, the waiting, the way institutions could be both miraculous and cruel before lunch. At the funeral, Isaiah held Naomi's hand and asked if Grandma could still hear clarinet music in heaven. Naomi said she did not know about heaven's acoustics, but she knew Corinne had loved him loud enough to echo.
Now, watching Isaiah relearn his instrument above a bakery that smelled of yeast and sugar, Naomi felt Corinne at her shoulder like weather. You do not leave your people in a room where they are being made small. The sentence had carried her through the auditorium doors. It would carry her through the settlement and the transfer and the nights when doubt whispered that she had made too much of a moment. Doubt was clever. Doubt used the voices of petition-signers and golf-shirt mutterers and every article that called parental advocacy a disruption. Naomi listened to doubt long enough to understand it, then set it down.
Isaiah's father, Malik, resurfaced that August in a message that managed to be both brief and late. He had seen something online—perhaps the short article, perhaps a share. He wrote that he was sorry. He wrote that if they needed money for lawyers, he could send some. He wrote that Isaiah could call him. Naomi stared at the message for a long time. She showed it to Ruth, who snorted. She showed it to Marta, who said money was useful and fatherhood was not a transferrable payment. She showed it, carefully, to Isaiah.