She shook her head, washing her hands at the sink, carefully soaping and lathering each finger. “Oh, no. If they don’t have anything better to do, they can stare at me, I don’t really care. It’s my house. I can burn all the food I want to as long as the house don’t catch fire.” She laughed at her joke, and looked at them, and they looked at one another.

Jamal stayed in the kitchen while she worked. Upstairs, Ronny left the door to his room open, listening. Diego stuck his head in the door, hair still wet from the shower, shoulders bare; “Is she okay?” he asked.

“She’s fine, now. She knows where she is and what she’s doing.”

He shook his head. A nice guy, chemistry major, hoping to get into medical school. Pudgy, short, and flatfooted. He nodded, hurried off to his room, saying, “I’ll leave my door open, too.”

“Jamal is with her right now.”

When Ronny was alone in the room the feeling of emptiness settled over him, that he was awake on a Saturday, that nothing had changed, that it was months now, that he was still here, and the awful waiting went on, refused to leave him no matter what he did. Today was a game day. No way to escape knowing; the football team was playing at the University of Virginia. Ben was there in Charlottesville, a starter on the defense; across campus people would be listening to the game on the radio. Later today at The Chapel Hill Newspaper the sportswriters would be talking about the game, typing about it, the photographers would print their pictures, Ronny would assemble the pages and read the stories and remember. The whole day he would be reminded: Ben had come home, but from where?

JULY

Ronny had spent the latter part of June and all of July stunned and restless. Ben had disappeared after his mother died, and no one knew where he had gone. He had not heard from Nina since the funeral and finally called her in July: no, she didn’t know where Ben was, selfish fuck to leave them all to deal with Mom’s death, Dad just sitting in the house in shock, the two of them frantic—no, she didn’t expect to hear from him, the sorry bastard, and what good would it do anybody if he called? She told Ronny to forget it all, let it go, move on. Ben wasn’t worth anybody’s time, was he? She’d never forgive him. Leaving her alone to deal with all this shit. She broke down in the end. She hoped he might have heard something. Rage poured out of her, as though Ben had stabbed her in the heart. “You’ll tell me if you hear from him, right?” she asked. “Send me a note or something.”

“I will. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Not soon.”

“Yeah. I know. But he’ll be back for fucking football. You can bet on that.”