The tires hummed on the concrete. A truck passed them on the left, its trailer lit up like a ship.
"When did you understand it?" Marcus said.
"When I had you." She turned her head, finally, and looked at him in the dashboard light. "The first time they put you in my arms. Nine pounds. You came out yelling like you had something to say to somebody. And I looked at you and I thought, Oh. Oh, Lord. Now I have to keep this alive. In Birmingham. In this country. And I was so scared, Marcus. I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. And I have been scared like that every single day of your life since. Every day you walked out that door. Every day you were late. Every time the phone rang after ten o’clock at night. Every time I saw a police car I looked to see who was in the back of it." She looked down at her hands on the Bible. "I’m still scared. You’re thirty-eight years old and I’m still scared. I’ll be scared on my deathbed. It never stops. It doesn’t stop because they grow up. It doesn’t stop because they move to the suburbs."
"I know, Mama."
"No, you don’t. You don’t know." Her voice was fierce and then suddenly not. "Or maybe you do now. Maybe that’s what tonight was."
He drove. He did not know what to say. Downtown slid past on the left, the Capitol dome, the stadium, the dark windows of the office towers where in another life he had worked late every night for six years.
"You think I didn’t know it didn’t work?" his mother said.
He looked at her.