Chapter One
Six Blocks With a Blue Bag
Caleb Brooks counted his money twice on the kitchen counter, the way his father had taught him to count anything that mattered. Bills flat, coins in a stack, total said out loud so the number had to behave. Fourteen dollars and some change, saved out of his allowance across most of the summer, and most of it was already spoken for. Not by him. It was the secret he had carried all week, and carrying it had made the week feel taller.
The list from his father was on the counter under a magnet shaped like a basketball. Cereal, the big box, not the small one. Pancake syrup. Batteries, two packs, the size that fit the remotes and the flashlight in the hall drawer. Ordinary things, written in Marcus Brooks's square handwriting, the list of a man who worked at a desk ten steps from the kitchen and still wrote lists as if the store were in another country.
Caleb added one item of his own, in his head, where lists could not be found and read aloud. Sour candy, the kind that came in a roll and cost less than a dollar. A boy was allowed one item of his own. His father had said so the first time Caleb ever walked to the store alone, and had said it the same way every time since, like a law being read into the record.
The other item, the real one, was not written anywhere at all.
His father's birthday was in three days. Caleb had known what he wanted to buy since the week before, when he had stood in the card aisle of the convenience store with a bag of ice in his hand and read the cards one by one while the ice dripped through the plastic onto his shoe. Most of the cards were wrong: jokes about getting old, gold letters about fathers being heroes. His father was not a hero in the gold letters sense. His father was a man who investigated insurance fraud at a desk in the back room and made pancakes on Saturdays and came outside. When Caleb was small and the world had been newly divided into two houses, his father had simply kept coming outside. Every time. Down the steps, onto the driveway, into whatever weather Caleb was standing in. So when Caleb found the plain card, the one with the short sentence inside in plain print, he had read it four times and then hidden it behind the others until today.
Thanks for coming outside.
He bought it first, before the cereal, before anything, and he paid for it out of the birthday money in the separate pocket of his shorts, and he asked the woman at the register if she would put it in the bag first, at the very bottom, under everything. She had looked at him the way adults look at children when children are being serious about something, and she had done it without a word.
The cereal went on top of the card. Then the syrup, heavy and careful. Then the batteries. Then the sour candy, his one allowed item, laid across the top like a flag. The blue plastic bag swung against his leg as he pushed out into the afternoon.
It was a sunny day, the kind that made the whole street look recently washed. Six blocks home. Caleb knew the walk the way he knew the route from his bed to the bathroom in the dark. Past the corner where the hedge grew over the sidewalk and you had to duck. Past the house with the dog that barked at wheels and only wheels. Past the mailbox painted green by someone who had run out of the right color and decided to be proud of it anyway. He walked on the side away from the sun so the syrup would not get warm, because a warm bottle had once earned him a month of gentle teasing.
He was eleven years old and small for it, with straight brown hair that fell into his eyes when he ran, and he wore the maroon hoodie because the afternoon had a edge on it that the sun was pretending not to know about. People who saw him saw a boy with a grocery bag. That was all there was to see, and it was the whole truth of him at that moment: a boy, a bag, a list completed, a secret riding at the bottom under the cereal.
At the end of the fifth block he stopped, the way he always stopped, and looked down the last stretch toward home. He could see the roof of the gray house from there, and the top of the basketball hoop his father had raised over the garage the spring Caleb turned nine, raising it a notch every year since, so that shooting at it always stayed a little bit like reaching.