Chapter 4: Claudette's Mother Comes Home Late

The headlights came down Sycamore Lane at twelve minutes past two, which Claudette knew because she had been watching the clock on the kitchen wall since eleven-thirty and had decided, three separate times, to go to bed.

She didn't go to bed.

She sat at the kitchen table with a glass of sweet tea gone warm and a library book open to a page she had read four times without retaining a word, and she listened to her mother's Buick settle in the gravel drive — the particular sound of the engine dying, then the tick of it cooling, then the long pause before the car door opened that meant her mother was sitting in the dark of the driveway doing something Claudette had no name for. Collecting herself, maybe. Putting something away in a place where it would keep.