"I promise."
Caleb nodded against his ribs, satisfied, and Marcus sat there with him for a while longer in the gray glow of the moon lamp, listening to the hamster wake up and begin, with great seriousness, to run on its wheel.
His mother did not speak for the first twenty minutes.
She sat in the passenger seat of his Acura with her overnight bag at her feet and her purse in her lap and her Bible on top of the purse, looking straight ahead through the windshield at the dark road. She had changed out of her church clothes into slacks and a cardigan. She had not said goodbye to anyone. She had walked out through the garage past the open Highlander without looking at it and gotten into the car and buckled her seat belt and folded her hands, and Marcus had backed out of the driveway with Danielle watching from the kitchen window and Caleb’s face, small and pale, in the window above.
They went north on 74 and then onto the interstate. The city came up ahead of them, the towers lit against the low orange sky. At that hour the traffic was thin, trucks mostly, and the lanes stretched out wide and empty under the sodium lights.
"I was four," his mother said, "when they bombed the church."
Marcus glanced at her. She was still looking straight ahead.
"Sixteenth Street. I wasn’t there. We went to Sixth Avenue Baptist. But my mother knew one of those girls’ mothers from the cleaners. I remember her coming home that day and sitting down at the kitchen table without taking off her hat. She sat there with her hat on and her pocketbook in her lap like she was waiting for a bus. All afternoon. She didn’t cook. She didn’t say a word. My daddy came home from the plant and stood in the door and looked at her, and then he went and got his strap and he whipped all four of us. All four. Me and Junior and Clarice and the baby. The baby was two. He didn’t say why. We hadn’t done anything." She was quiet for a moment. "I didn’t understand it for years. I thought we’d done something. I used to lie in bed trying to figure out what it was."