“Sorry,” Allison said, and the sorry was real and late.
“It’s okay,” Jonah said, because his mother had told him to say that when adults got strange, and then he walked toward track four because the train he needed was the delayed one and the delay was why he had stopped.
On the train he sat with the backpack on his knees and did not smile. Smiling felt like agreeing the atrium had been a test he had wanted. He had wanted the piano. The adults had been weather. Weather did not get a review. He ate the crackers his mother had put in the front pocket and watched the backs of houses until South Bend came up in the ugly useful way of a city he knew.
His mother, Renee Hale, was thirty-three and on a swing shift at the hospital laundry. She was not at the station. She thought he was at the library with a book about bridges. He had been at the library. He had also been at the piano. Both were true if you did not ask the order. He was careful with the order. Careful was how a ten-year-old kept a keyboard and a train fare and a mother who counted hours.