Apology

clock on the far wall and wrote the time on a pink pad where she normally recorded Mr. Towson’s While You Were Out messages.
“Go on,” Josie said into the phone.
It sounded to Shoe like the woman had said gone.
“Go on,” Josie said again, slower from her irritation.
“At the site near Pinewood Meadows,” Shoe said, trying to picture the billboard nearest the entrance that zigzagged until it reached the huge field, where the giant machinery was. “You’ll find a girl there. She’s hurt.”
“What girl?” Josie said, writing down Pinewood Meadows.
Then her wide eyes fell right to the little girl on her desk. This one wore a bonnet that matched the half-oval lace apron tied around her green and orange dress. She was being led home to her mother. Josie studied the figurine, the painted commas of the girl’s gleeful eyes. The flower basket woman’s matching happiness. Maybe they could hear the boy singing after all. Maybe the boy’s voice was so bad that it had brought them joy.
In the hours before dawn he woke, having heard a noise in the kitchen. It was too early for it to be Mary. He felt around in the dark. There was nothing for him to use as a weapon. Over near the front door, he bent down and felt around blindly. One of his new boots fell against his arm. He decided, at the very least, he could swing it so that the hard end, the hidden steel, would strike first. That would knock someone unconscious.
He rounded a corner into the small dining room. There was the sound of glass clinking against glass. When he could see into the kitchen, he found the refrigerator light cast across his nephew’s face. The boy looked surprised to see his uncle staring at him. He nearly dropped the gallon of milk he was holding with both hands.
“Sorry, Tio,” Mario said. “I missed dinner.”
“Where were you?”
Mario drank from the milk carton and put it back in the refrigerator. He closed the door so he didn’t have to see the scar on his uncle’s shoulder. The only light in the kitchen was coming in as a faint, yellow glow from the bulb over the neighbor’s garage door. It was enough to frame his uncle’s silhouette.
Mario took a seat at the table by the window. He opened the curtain so that more light could come in. Shoe, seeing his nephew do this, dragged himself over to a seat and sat opposite the boy. Shoe waited for him to speak.
Outside, there were the sirens of emergency vehicles. Their blaring so far away. The sound wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Shoe’s eyes had adjusted, and he could see his nephew making a fist with one hand and covering it with the next. Then the boy traded off, so that the hand that had been a covering was now a fist; the prior fist, a covering.
“You brought back my football,” Mario said.
“I found it,” Shoe said.
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
Mario bit his bottom lip, pulling it down against his tongue.
“Were you there?” Shoe said.
He wanted his nephew to deny it. He wanted the boy to wonder aloud that he had loaned it to the girl, or to another boy even. That he didn’t know where his football had been. That way Shoe would know for sure.
Mario made a fist with the other hand and covered it again.
Shoe remembered when he had been Mario’s age, before he had been taken by the old man and his soldiers. Paul was pulling him aside and asking why he had stolen eggs from the neighboring houses. When Shoe had denied any wrongdoing, Paul had hit him so hard across the head that Shoe thought he was going to throw up. He didn’t know how to tell his older brother that it had been a joke, that the other boys were testing him and he was going to go through with it, even though he didn’t like eggs back then. It was supposed to make his friends laugh.
They could hold these things in their hands, these little stones the color of snow, not that any of them had ever seen snow; but the deal was that Shoe, the boy Exequiel, was to take as many as he could find and hide them until each rotted and became splotchy gray and shadowy. He and his friends were going to use them as weapons against one another. The smell would stay on whomever had been struck. It would be funny to see the adults crinkle their noses as the targeted boy passed them in the square, everyone wondering then what terrible thing had died.
“So you know?” Mario said.
Shoe nodded, but he wasn’t sure if his nephew saw him do so. “Yes,” he said.
Mario heaved, trying to hold in his breath, but he couldn’t. It blurted out, like air suddenly escaping a balloon. He thought she would have gone home on her own, but today, Tom wasn’t at school and then he heard that she had been found and was now in a hospital. He could cry remembering her leaping in the air and him, stupid as he was, thinking only of beaming her good with the ball.
“What happened?” Shoe said.
“We were just playing,” Mario said. “I was chasing her. We were throwing the ball at each other. I threw it at her and she fell. I thought she was kidding. It was so dumb, Tio. Anyone could have made that jump!”
“You threw the ball at her?”
“I was playing.”
“That’s how she fell?”
His uncle’s last question made him cry.
“I know it was stupid,” Mario said.
He bunched both fists and covered his eyes with them.
The yellowing light brushed his nephew. Shoe leaned across the table to pull one of the fists down, but Mario drew back and continued to hide his face. He coughed against his folded arms.
When Paul had hit Shoe for stealing, Paul had been the one to weep immediately. Somewhere along the line his brother Exequiel had strayed. Of