Junior was attempting to climb the artificial rock wall that was attached to the playset. Monica boosted up her son. Lexi, at the top already, hopped onto the slide and barreled down the tube with a gleeful cry.

Monica spent the next several minutes minding her children and trying not to worry about her mother’s worrisome comments. But she didn’t relax until she saw Grace coming back in their direction.

“Is everything okay?” Monica asked.

“Of course, my dear. I had some business to attend to in the ladies room.” Grace bounded onto the stairs of the playset with the light-footedness of a cat, much to the delight of Lexi and Junior. “Nana is ready to play. I’ll race you children to the bottom!”

They spent another half hour or so at the park. Grace, for her part, seemed to enjoy romping about as much as the children did, and Monica wondered if Grace had her own reasons for wanting this park excursion. She watched with amazement as her mother navigated the bars of a jungle gym as adeptly as a gymnast, at one point even swinging upward onto the top of the bars and stepping across them as if traversing a balance beam.

I was never that agile, Monica thought. Not as a child, not now, and most definitely would not be as a nearly sixty-year-old woman.

Feeding off Grace’s boundless energy, the kids ran, leapt, and shouted, and were thoroughly exhausted when Grace declared that it was time for them to leave.

As they were loading the children in the SUV, Monica heard sirens approaching. An ambulance veered into the parking lot, lights ablaze, followed closely by two police cruisers.

“Let’s move along now, family,” Grace said, revving the engine.

Monica buckled her seat belt. “What do you think is going on?”

“It could be anything,” Grace said with a shrug. “At a large, public playground such as this, with so many unsupervised children running about freely, sometimes, children get hurt. Sometimes, they deserve it.”

A question formed like an ominous thundercloud in Monica’s mind, and the implications of it were so unsettling that she didn’t dare to speak it aloud. She shoved the thought away and switched on the radio, found the R&B station, and leaned back in her seat to let the classic grooves of Earth, Wind & Fire sweep away her worries.

“Now,” Grace said, and flashed a grin that seemed almost manic in its intensity. “Who wants to go get ice cream?”

20

Later that afternoon, Troy met his good friend, Rodney Marshall, at Hoops, an athletic center in Buckhead. Troy needed to get outside of the house for a while and breathe. At home, the brew of emotions permeating the air was so thick he’d felt as though he were inhaling cotton.