He takes another hesitant step forward. Simon can tell he wants to hide under the wing of Betty’s arm, or in the cave of her skirt but is too old and doesn’t want to do that in front of a stranger.

“Didn’t know you had an uncle, huh?”

The boy shakes his head. His eyes rest on the scratched linoleum floor.

“Well I didn’t know I had a nephew, neither,” says Simon and he tries to laugh, hacking out a few quick sobs before turning back to his coffee.

“Ten years old. Eleven this May.”

“Damn. Damn it.” Simon shudders in his chair.

The boy speaks. “I know what you did.”

Simon stiffens, his knuckles wrapped white around the coffee mug.

“Lincoln!” Betty half rises from her chair. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I saw. I saw it. I know.”

“You’d better get quiet.”

The boy keeps looking at Simon.

“I saw what you did. I saw you touch him and he died.”

“Goddamn it, Lincoln!”

Betty rises and slaps him across the cheek.

“Leave him alone,” Simon whispers. “It’s okay. Really.”

He looks over and sees the boy’s lower lip trembling. Lincoln is trying not to cry. The three of them look in opposite directions. Their gazes jut out from their gathered bodies like spokes on a wheel, turning slowly around the kitchen.

Betty sighs.

“You’d better get to school.”

Lincoln bolts across the room, swoops up his jacket and slams out of the house.

Betty looks at Simon.

“I never told him,” she says. “I never told him. I didn’t.”

Simon looks up at the sagging ceiling tiles and shrugs his shoulders.

“Can’t help it if he finds out what everybody already knows.”

Betty tries to keep her eyes steady, locked on her son. She has told herself she would look at him. At his forearms braided like old willow. His river-stone eyes. The bevel of his smooth jaw. She has told herself she would look at him. That she would give him neither her shredded love nor her hatred. That she would hold him with her eyes. Not with her hands, not with those, surely. But she can’t, and instead watches his hands, the quiet hands of a murderer.