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She doesn’t say anything for a second. Then: “Sunday dinner. You’re coming home. I’m making oxtails.”

“Mama, I don’t think I can…”

“You’re coming home Sunday, or I’m coming down there. And you don’t want me coming down there, Dylan. I will find out where you are. I will get on that Greyhound with my good purse.”

She hangs up.

I sit there holding my phone.

Behind me, a big hand slides around the side of my neck.

“Who was that?”

I didn’t hear him come in. I never hear him come in.

“My mama.”

His thumb rubs the side of my throat. Slow. “What did she want?”

“She saw the video.”

His thumb stops moving on my throat. Then it starts again, slower.

“Good,” he says.

* * *

I don’t tell him I’m going.

I’m not stupid. I know what he said, with his mouth against my ear and my face pressed to that glass. Next time you run, I’m putting a baby in you before I bring you home. And he meant it.

But this isn’t running. This is going to see my mama.

That’s what I tell myself, at six o’clock Sunday morning, when Tasha’s Civic pulls up to the gate, and the new guards make her pop the trunk, and look under the seats, and look under the car with a little mirror on a stick, and then let her come up to the house, and I walk out the front door in my church dress and get in the passenger seat.

“Morning,” Tasha says. She’s got on sunglasses and a bonnet. “Is this a kidnapping? I need to know what kind of drive this is.”

“I’m going to see my mama.”

“Does he know?”

I don’t answer.

She looks at me over her sunglasses. Then she puts the car in drive. “Okay. Okay. I’ma need you to know I’m not getting in no trunk on the way back.”

The guards watch us roll through. They don’t stop us. One of them picks up a radio.

I watch him do it in the side mirror the whole way down the hill.

* * *

Six hours later, we pull up in front of my mama’s house on 82nd Avenue.

It’s the same as it’s always been. Little green house. White security bars on the windows. Mama’s roses out front, the ones she talks to every morning. The porch with the plastic chairs. The church van from Greater New Hope parked across the street, and Mr. Washington next door sitting on his porch in his undershirt like he’s been there since 1979, ‘cause he has.

I’m home.

I get out of the car and stand on the sidewalk and breathe for a second, and my eyes get hot.