It was small. It was the smallest thing. A hitch of the shoulder, a quick involuntary jerk of her whole body backward in the chair, there and gone. Her hand had gone to her chest. Her eyes were fixed on the frog in her grandson’s hands, the lime-green plastic, the barrel pointed at her son, and for one second on that bright June afternoon Marcus saw on her face the same thing he had seen on it the night she came home from prayer meeting. He saw her see her son dead on the grass.
Then Caleb shrieked with laughter and pumped the frog again, and the moment passed, and his mother let out a long, slow breath and lowered her hand to her lap.
Caleb ran up the deck steps, dripping, and held out the purple shark to her.
"Grandma," he said. "You can be on my team."
Loretta looked at the shark. She looked at Marcus, standing in the grass with water running off his chin. She looked for a long time, and he could not tell what she was thinking, and then she put down her sweet tea and took the shark in both hands. Her hands were shaking. She turned it over, examining it with a nurse’s frowning attention, the pump, the trigger, the ridiculous purple fin.
"How do you work this foolish thing," she said.
Caleb showed her. She pumped it, once, twice, three times, the way he told her, and then she raised it, still frowning, and pointed it at her son, and pulled the trigger.
It hit Marcus square in the chest. It made a sound like a cartoon burp. And his mother, sixty-eight years old, in her good Sunday slacks, sitting under an umbrella on a back deck in Fayette County, began to laugh. She laughed until she had to put the shark down. She laughed until she was wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. Marcus stood in the grass with his shirt soaked through and listened to it, and he realized he could not remember ever having heard his mother laugh like that, not once, not in his whole life, and he thought of all the years it had been inside her, waiting, painted shut.