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Kwame ponders this as the pizza arrives, and he and Sylvester greedily help themselves to the thick, steaming slices like they offer salvation. “Apparently, they found Wade’s shoes by the reservoir. Do you think that’s where they were headed?”

“I don’t know about that. Yeah, I heard kids went out there to drink and to meet up with girls, but Wade didn’t strike me as the type to get caught up in all that. If he was hanging out with those white boys, it was usually related to school, not pallin’ around. He woulda known better than to spend time with that cat Roger, socializing at least. It was clear as a freshly washed window that Roger was the type to hate anyone darker than an eggshell. The way he would glower at me, and don’t think I didn’t overhear him throw the N-word around more than once, and on purpose so I could hear it. Wouldn’t have packed much of a punch if I didn’t. That’s why it was so surprising, Wade getting in the car with those two. Especially the night before finals. I remember the day because there was a tradition of toilet-papering the campus the day exams were over, and I was dreading it because guess who had to clean that mess up every year? Wade always had his nose in a book. He was doing real well too. Real well. I remember being proud of that—you know how you just wanna see us succeed? That he was going to be top of his class… it’s silly, but it meant something to me. Like, you go show them crackers, you know?”

Kwame did know all about that. It’s that feeling of pride that made him idolize Jackson Wainwright and his other journalism heroes. That drove him to put a poster of Ida B. Wells up in his room in middle school, where a Kobe Bryant poster might have hung. It’s the reason why he worked so hard to put together that panel at Northwestern last month, and why he mentors a young BIPOC journalist through the National Association of Black Journalists every year… because there’s always going to be a fight to prove something—your talent, your drive, your work ethic; that battle is a collective endeavor. Those triumphs are shared.

Even in going to Tate, Wade opened a door and offered a path, same way Kwame did when he held up that Murrow award. He hated, obviously, that “showing” white people had to be any sort of motivation, but it was a tale as old as time, or at least the country.

“So you also know they don’t take kindly to being shown up. Upsets their sense of the rightful order of things. And that always leads to something bad for us. For Wade.”

“You think his classmates did something to him. Maybe even just outright killed him?”

“He’s gone, ain’t he?” Sylvester glares at Kwame like he’s a naive rube who knows nothing about anything. Any sliver of a thought that Kwame had that Wade’s death could have been some sort of accident, some misunderstanding, something that had nothing to do even with Larry or Roger, withers in the white heat of that pointed stare. But he’s still not any clearer on what actually happened.

“I wish I could tell you more,” Sylvester says, throwing his napkin on his cleaned plate before stretching his spine against the booth. “But I can say this, I feel a little lighter. Hate that I feel that way, actually, like a mercy I don’t deserve, but I do.”

“You do deserve it, the mercy. There’s nothing you could have done. You know that, right?”

“Nah, don’t try to let me off the hook. I gotta live with it. Like I said, I coulda told the police who I’d seen Wade leave that night with when they came ’round. And maybe they would have asked those boys more questions.”

“That wouldn’t have saved Wade, though, is all I mean.”

“Yeah, but it might’ve meant that they could have found out what happened.”

“You don’t know that either.” It’s Kwame’s turn to be cynical.

A cross between a world-weary sigh and a soft belch escapes from Sylvester. “That’s facts, as the kids say. But still, it’s weighed on me. Heavy as this pizza sitting in my belly. I gotta ask, though, that you not use my name in your story, in your podcast. Not so worried about being fired at this point, because I finally decided to put my notice in next month. My sisters want to get a place for all of us in the Upper Peninsula, and I’m beyond ready for that long-afternoon-naps-on-the-screened-in-porch life. But Tate—they wouldn’t take too kindly to me being the link that puts them in the news for this. They could still mess with my pension. I can’t do anything to jeopardize that money, as hard as I’ve worked, you understand?”

The Tate School is going to have to deal with the fallout, and Kwame has little sympathy for the bad PR that would come their way given how little concern they had for the death of a student, how little they did to protect Wade. Seems to Kwame the world is always protecting and punishing the wrong people in direct inverse proportion.

He assures Sylvester that he can move forward without mentioning his name, but what do next steps even look like? Now that two people have put Wade together with Larry and Roger, the logical move is to confront Larry, dementia or not. But first, before anything else, he has to talk to Simone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN SIMONE

“Are you leaving him?”

“Mom! No, I’m not leaving my husband!” At least Simone doesn’t think she is.

“Well, you show up on my doorstep outta nowhere last night, letting Langston miss school and with those bags under your eyes…”

Simone pats her face self-consciously, like her fingers can deliver a miracle only an expensive concealer or twenty-six hours of sleep could see to. “I told you, we’re just here for the weekend, a couple nights. I need…” Simone can’t finish that sentence because she doesn’t know what she needs. Instead, she unleashes a pitiful wail, loud and drawn out enough that the two oily black crows perched on telephone wires above them startle and fly off.

Those birds were the only other souls around besides Simone and her mother, who are bundled up against the wind as they power walk down Rosa Parks Boulevard. Langston rides several yards ahead on the dusty Huffy procured from deep within her mom’s garage, the same one Simone first learned to ride on when she was not much older than her son. There was no helmet, which gave Simone pause until Donette rolled her eyes at what she views as Simone’s chronic overprotection. “Girl, you were fine and he’ll be fine. You also ate McDonald’s twice a week and it didn’t kill you.”

They’ve traipsed twenty city blocks this morning and are only now getting into why she’s here. Her mom spared her from any questions when she and Langston arrived at her doorstep at eleven o’clock last night. It was too late to dig into everything, or anything at all. Simone immediately put Langston to bed in her old childhood bedroom and then sat and ate warmed leftover chili at the kitchen table where she once did her homework, while her mother hovered, silent but watchful.

Simone can still taste the cinnamon from the chili—her mother’s secret ingredient—on the back of her tongue as she sucks in a deep breath of the always slightly metallic Detroit air. Her mom has pulled ahead of her yet again, keeping the determined pace of someone in a hurry to get somewhere, even though they have no place to be and there are so many places Simone would rather be, like back in the toasty kitchen. But Donette would not be deterred from today’s walk and would also not be deterred by Simone’s initial refusal to join her. She just thrust Simone’s coat at her and said, “Let’s go.”

Her mother’s daily morning trek—two miles down Rosa Parks to the Motown Museum where she stops, turns on her heels, and walks the two miles back—is sacrosanct. In the rain you’ll find her encased in a giant plastic poncho, in the snow a hearty, bright-red parka, but the weather has never once stopped her. Donette says that once she got to one hundred days on her walking streak—the one she started the week after her husband of fifteen years died—she just couldn’t stop. Committing to the ritual became a sacred endeavor, a daily pilgrimage of grief she’s kept up for more than decades now.

The Detroit News even did a story on her, a clip that still lives wrinkled and yellowed on Donette’s refrigerator. The redheaded woman who came to interview her mother was the first reporter Simone had met, and if she ever saw the woman again, she might thank her for planting the seed of her wanting to become a journalist.

Donette responds to Simone’s anguished wail with a no-nonsense pat on the back and waits for her to go on. She’s a master of waiting patiently for Simone to open up, like someone coaxing a wary cat from under a car, and today is no exception. Simone has always appreciated this about her mother, that she could relieve herself of her burdens—the failed math test, the crush who asked Simone’s best friend to homecoming instead of her, getting her heart broken by Kwame over pancakes—on her own time and terms without the added weight of her mom pressing her about what was wrong. Donette trusted Simone would share in her own time, and so she always did.

Simone’s told her nothing so far. She just called from an Uber late last night and said she’d be there in thirty minutes and then she was too tired to talk about anything when she arrived.

Now, in the cold light of morning, she struggles to figure out where to even begin. So she skips straight to the headline. “I’m a mess, Momma.”

“I figured as much when you mentioned Mr. Kwame Walker was back on the scene.”