"I’m sorry, Mama."
"Are you?"
He thought about it. "I’m sorry it happened like that. I’m not sorry she came."
His mother was silent for a long time on the line.
"That girl’s mama probably whipped her too," she said finally, and hung up.
He sat with the phone in his hand in the dark study. He thought she was probably right. He thought about Renita Dorsey’s calm, level, unhurried voice, and wondered what it had cost her to learn to speak that way, and what she had been carrying up the stairs to his son’s room in that canvas tote bag along with her notebook.
On the Saturday after the pediatrician, he walked next door and knocked on the Halvorsens’ front door. Greg Halvorsen opened it in a Braves T-shirt with a spatula in his hand, smelling of charcoal, and listened with a deepening frown while Marcus explained, as calmly as he could, about the airsoft rifle and the Sharpie and the deputy.
"Jeez," Greg said. "Jeez, Marcus. I had no idea. I’ll talk to Tyler. That tip is supposed to stay on, I told him that." He shook his head. "But I mean—kids, right? The deputy just drove on. Kids are kids. I did way worse at that age. We used to shoot BB guns at stop signs out in the—"