His father stood in the hallway the entire time. Marcus could see him over his mother’s shoulder, a big quiet man in his work shirt from the steel plant, his arms hanging at his sides. He did not come forward. He did not say anything. When it was over his mother put the belt down on the arm of the couch and went into the kitchen and ran the water in the sink for a long time, and his father went back into the bedroom and closed the door.
That night Marcus lay on his stomach in his bed because he could not lie on his back. Some time after midnight the door opened and his father came in and sat on the edge of the mattress, and for a long while he said nothing, and then he put one hand on the top of Marcus’s head and left it there. That was all. The hand on his head, heavy and warm, for a long time. Then his father got up and went out.
Marcus never picked up a toy gun again. Not a cap gun, not a water pistol, not the laser tag blasters at Kyle Hendricks’s twelfth birthday party, which he said he was too old for. He learned the rest of it the way all the boys he knew learned it, in pieces, from uncles and older cousins and the news: hands on the wheel, no sudden moves, yes sir, no sir, keep your receipt, don’t run, don’t ever run. He grew tall and careful and polite. He got a scholarship to Georgia Tech and an engineering degree and a job with a firm in Midtown, and then a better job, and then a house on a cul-de-sac in a county where the schools were good and the lawns were wide, and in all those years he told the story of Avenue J exactly twice.
The first time was in college, at two in the morning in somebody’s dorm room, when a group of them were trading stories about their mothers, and he told it as a comedy. My mama tore me up, he said, and did his mother’s voice, the words with the strokes, and everybody laughed, because everybody had a mother like that, or knew one, and he laughed too and said, Best thing that ever happened to me. Never touched a toy gun again. I’m alive, aren’t I?
The second time was to Danielle, the year they were engaged, on the back porch of her mother’s house in South London on a gray afternoon. He told it the same way. He did the voice. He said, I’m alive, aren’t I? And Danielle did not laugh. She looked at him for a long moment across the little iron table with the teapot between them and then she reached over and put her hand on his wrist, and she said, Oh, love, in a voice so soft that he had to look away, out at the garden, at her mother’s roses, until the moment passed.
He had not told it since. He had not needed to. It was his story, and it was over, and it had made him who he was, and he had decided a long time ago what it meant.
"Inside," Marcus said. "All of us. Now."
Danielle looked at the end of the street again. "She’s back at half nine. Bernice’s friend drops her at the corner and she walks up."
"Then we’ve got twenty minutes."