"Yes, baby," she said. "That was wrong too."
Marcus did not remember getting up. He remembered only that he was in the kitchen, standing at the sink with both hands on the edge of the counter and the water running, the way his mother had run it in Ensley after she put the belt down, the water running and running so no one would hear. Behind him in the living room he heard Caleb say something, and his mother answer, and then he heard a sound he could not at first identify, and then he realized it was his son laughing—at what, he never found out—and his mother laughing too, a short, startled, rusty laugh, like a door opening that had been painted shut.
After a while Danielle came into the kitchen and turned off the water and stood beside him. She did not say anything. She put her hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and left it there.
By June the visits were every other Sunday, and by the end of June Danielle had stopped sitting in the room for all of them.
The water blasters were Marcus’s idea. He had thought about it for a long time. He had sat with Caleb in April in the cab of his truck in the Dairy Queen parking lot on Highway 54, with two Blizzards melting in the cup holders, and told him the rest of it, all of it, the things his own father had never told him and his mother had tried to tell him with a belt: about police and what to do with your hands, about not running, about how the rules were different for Owen and how unfair that was and how it was not his fault, and how none of it meant that he was bad or that he should be afraid every minute of his life, only that he should be careful, and smart, and that his parents would always, always come and get him. Caleb had listened to the whole thing with a spoon in his mouth and then asked a great many questions, some of which Marcus could answer and some of which he could not, and at the end he had asked whether this was why Grandma did it, and Marcus had said yes, and Caleb had nodded slowly and said, "She should have just told me," and Marcus had sat in the cab of his truck and thought that his son was the wisest person he had ever met.
So in June he went to the big-box store and stood in the summer aisle for a long time and bought two water blasters that looked like nothing in the world but water blasters: one in the shape of a shark, translucent purple, and one in the shape of a frog, lime green with bulging eyes. They had pump handles and big clear tanks and they made a sound like a cartoon burp when you fired them. Backyard only, he told Caleb. Never in the front. Never at a car. Never at anyone who isn’t playing.
"Never at a car," Caleb agreed solemnly, and then shot him in the face with the frog.
His mother was there that Sunday. She was sitting on the back deck in the shade of the umbrella in a folding chair with a glass of sweet tea sweating on the little table beside her, and when Caleb pumped the frog and leveled it at his father and let fly, Marcus, coughing and laughing and soaked to the collar, happened to glance up at her, and saw her flinch.