"You think I’m a fool? I’m a nurse. Thirty-one years. I’ve read things. I know what they say about it now. I knew back then. I knew a whipping wasn’t going to stop a bullet. I knew it the whole time I was doing it." She was looking out the side window now, at the overpass going by, at the dark neighborhoods beyond it. "I did it anyway. Because it was the only thing I had in my hands. Do you understand what I’m telling you? There was a whole world out there that wanted to kill my child and there was not one thing I could do about any of it. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t vote it away or pray it away or move far enough to get away from it. The only thing in my hands was you."
Marcus’s eyes had filled. He blinked hard and kept them on the road.
"That’s what I’m telling you," his mother said quietly. "That’s all. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just telling you what it was."
They did not speak again until Decatur. Aunt Bernice’s house was a little brick ranch on a street of little brick ranches near the old courthouse, with a carport and a glider on the front porch and a ceramic goose by the steps that Bernice dressed in seasonal outfits. Tonight the goose was wearing a yellow raincoat. The porch light was on. Marcus had called ahead from the driveway, and Bernice was standing in the open door in her housecoat and a satin bonnet, three years older than her sister and six inches taller, with her arms crossed.
Loretta got out of the car without a word and walked up the steps with her bag, and Bernice held the screen door for her and touched her shoulder as she passed, and Loretta went inside and did not look back.
Marcus got out and stood by the car. Bernice came down the steps in her house slippers and stood in front of him in the warm dark. She looked at him for a long time.
"She told me on the phone," Bernice said. "Before you called. She called me from the bathroom."
"Aunt Bernice—"