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feel?”
    Wesley looked down at the floor; Lucy watched the baseball game on the television.
    “How that make you feel?”
    Wesley looked up at his uncle, then looked away, frustrated and angry that he was being backed into a corner.
    “How many times I’m going to have to ask you this question?”
    “It was a hammer and an apron and some nails. How much that can cost?”
    “Two hammers and a wedge, but it’s not about that. It’s about are you paying attention to what you doing. And I didn’t hear nobody say ‘I’m sorry.’ I heard ‘I meant to do this’ and ‘I meant to do that.’”
    Wesley turned and walked out of the kitchen and had not been back since.
     
    Now, on Thursday evening, SJ and Lucy brought their plates into the dining room to a big cypress table their grandfather had made that could seat ten people if it had to, and they joined hands as they always did, and bowed their heads, and SJ said, “Father, we thank you for the food you place on our table, and for us being here together. We pray that you keep us and those we love safe from harm and hunger. And we want to pray for Wesley, too, that he will come back unharmed and that we will be a whole family again. Amen.”
    Lucy said “Amen” along with SJ as she reached for the sweet potatoes. “You kept that short, SJ,” Lucy said. “Daddy say thank you for so many things by the time he finished the food be cold.”
    They sat silently, eating. SJ loved his house, with its waist-high wainscoting in the dining room, rescued from the old Tranchina’sRestaurant he and his daddy had demolished. The wide plank floors in the living room were varnished seat planks from high school bleachers from the West Bank. SJ had done all the work himself, treated the wood, replaced all the joists under the living room floor. On the wall, a painting of two swans that Rosetta’s sister Vonetta had made; she had had a scholarship to an art school somewhere and had died of a brain tumor when she was nineteen. That was a long time ago.
    “Samuel,” she said, “why you think you never got married again?”
    “No particular reason,” he answered, pouring some root beer into his glass from the bottle on the table.
    “But it seem like you never even go out or nothing.”
    “What about Melva?”
    “That bitch was no good for you, Samuel. That not what I’m talking about. I seen her last week out on the corner, you know what I’m saying; she look like…”
    SJ put up his hand and said, “I don’t really want to hear about that, Loot. I don’t necessarily want to hear about it.” It had been a brief relationship, five years in the past, but despite the woman’s bad behavior SJ saw no reason to take pleasure in a catalog of her misfortunes. The relationship hadn’t made him especially anxious to try romance again. He had felt old impulses aroused that he didn’t need to be dealing with. One night he actually found himself walking to Junior’s with a .38 in his waistband looking for a man he knew Melva had spent some time with, and luckily right up by Tennessee Street saw himself almost as if from above, like a voice saying to him, Are you going back to that? Is that what you want? And he had turned around and walked back to his house and wept in frustration and loneliness. But after that things were over with Melva, and he didn’t bother about it anymore.
    “What about Leeshawn, Samuel?”
    SJ wished his sister would stop the line of questioning. “She more like a cousin. Or used to be. Anyway I can’t see her without I see a teenager, and she lives in Los Angeles.” Actually, he remembered, she had moved back to Houston after her marriage failed. Didn’t matter.
    “She ain’t no teenager no more for a long time, SJ. She allright and she like you.”
    “I don’t see you with nobody, Loot,” he said, deflecting the question. “Why you don’t make time for a man?”
    “I don’t need nobody, Samuel. It allright at a distance. I get involved,