He did not have an answer for her. He sat with the phone against his ear in the dark study for a long time, listening to her breathe.
"I don’t know, Mama," he said finally. "I don’t know what it was for. I think maybe you’ll have to say it anyway."
She came in March, on the first warm Saturday of the year, when the dogwoods on Larkspur Court were just beginning to open. Bernice drove her and waited in the car with the radio on. She came to the front door this time, not through the garage, and rang the bell, and stood on the step in her church clothes with her purse on her arm and no Bible, holding instead a small index card with something written on it that she kept turning over and over in her fingers.
They sat in the living room. Danielle on the couch. Marcus in the armchair. Caleb at the far end of the couch, beside his mother, with Rex in his lap, although he would have told you he had outgrown Rex. Loretta sat on the edge of the other armchair, across from him, with her knees together and her purse at her feet, and she looked at her grandson for a long time without speaking. He had grown since September. He had lost another tooth. He looked back at her steadily, and did not smile, and did not look away.
His mother looked down at the index card in her hands. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and held it in her fist, and did not read it.
"Caleb," she said. "Grandma did a wrong thing to you."
Caleb said nothing.
"In the fall. When you were playing army with Owen. I took you in the house and I hurt you with Grandpa’s belt. And that was wrong." She stopped. Marcus saw her jaw work, saw her hold back the word that wanted to come next, the but, saw it rise all the way up into her mouth and saw her close her lips on it and swallow it down. "That was wrong," she said again. "I was scared, and I hurt you. And it wasn’t your fault. Not one bit of it. It was Grandma’s fault. And I’m sorry. I am so sorry, baby."