Danielle stood up. She did it slowly, one hand on her knee, like a much older woman, and when she was standing she finally looked at him, and he saw in her face something he had never seen there in eleven years of marriage, not during the miscarriage before Caleb, not during the year his father was dying, not during the worst of their fights. It was not anger. It was something much colder and more careful than anger. It was the look of a person who has already made a decision and is only waiting to find out what it will cost.
"Ask her what she did this afternoon."
For a moment nobody moved. Caleb’s fist was still knotted in his shirt. Marcus became aware of the passport wallet in his hand, the weight of it, the soft give of the leather, and then he became aware of something else, something that had been in front of him since his son came running down the driveway and that he had looked at without seeing.
It was eighty-four degrees. His son hated those pajamas. And he was wearing them buttoned to the throat, the sleeves pulled down over his wrists, the cuffs gathered into his fists.
Marcus put his hand on Caleb’s shoulder, gently, and then moved it down to his upper arm, meaning only to turn him a little, to look at his face.
Caleb flinched.
It was small. It was the smallest thing. A hitch of the shoulder, a quick sideways twist away from the hand, there and gone, and then his son was pressing back against him again as if it had not happened. But Marcus had felt it, and something in his body recognized it before his mind did, recognized it the way you recognize a smell from a house you lived in as a child. He took his hand away. He stood very still in his own driveway with the suitcases behind him and the night heat pressing down, and he did not ask the question that had already formed in him, because he was afraid that he knew the answer, and because he had known it, in some locked room of himself, for a very long time.
The summer Marcus was ten, his mother bought him a cap gun at the Dollar General on Avenue E for a dollar and forty-nine cents, plus a roll of red paper caps that came in a cardboard sleeve.
It was not a good cap gun. It was silver plastic made to look like chrome, with a fake pearl grip that had already started to peel at the seam, and when you pulled the trigger the hammer came down on the roll of caps with a snap that sounded less like a gunshot than like a stick breaking. But it was his, and it fit the waistband of his shorts, and for three days that July in Ensley he rode his bike up and down the cracked sidewalks of Avenue J shooting at stop signs and mailboxes and the Pattersons’ mean dog through the chain-link fence, the smell of burnt paper hanging around him like something grown-up and dangerous.