The living room was very quiet. Through the window Marcus could hear Bernice’s car radio out at the curb, a gospel station, faint and sweet.
Caleb looked at his grandmother for a long moment. Then he said, in his clear, interested, eight-year-old voice, the voice that had once interrupted a sermon:
"Did you do it to Daddy?"
Loretta’s hands stopped moving in her lap.
She did not look at Marcus. She kept her eyes on her grandson. "Yes," she said. "I did."
"Was that wrong too?"
And then she did look at Marcus. She turned her head and looked at him across the living room, across the coffee table where the blue passport wallet had lain on a night in September, across thirty-eight years and four blocks of Avenue J and a hot metal hood and a hallway with his father standing in it, and Marcus saw in her face that she was asking him something, and that he could not help her, and that she knew he could not.
She looked back at Caleb.