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Ardell waits outside. He's standing a couple of feet from the door, still waiting, when Jojo comes out carrying a plastic bag. Ardell looks right at Jojo, but Jojo doesn't look at Ardell. He walks past him and goes back up the street to his mother's house.

Ardell and his Russian army boots clomp back up the street behind Jojo and stop on the sidewalk outside Jojo's mother's house.
Jojo goes directly inside. Ardell stands on the sidewalk. People watch from their porches and their steps and their lawns until it becomes clear that nothing is going to happen. Then they go back about their business.

I go inside. Through the kitchen window, I see Jojo come out the sliding doors and onto the deck at the back of his mother's house. His mother is out there on a recliner. She looks smaller than she used to before Jojo went away.

Jojo puts the plastic bag from the ice-cream store onto a table that has an umbrella over it. He sets down a bowl and a spoon. He takes a container of ice cream out of the bag. He opens it and scoops some ice cream into the bowl, which he hands to his mother. She smiles at him when he gives her the bowl and the spoon. Her hand moves slowly from the bowl to her mouth. She seems to be putting a lot of effort into it, as if she is handling a shovel full of gravel instead of a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. But she gets it there. She swallows it, and she smiles again.

The whole time, Jojo has an eager, little-kid look on his face, like it really matters to him whether his mother likes the ice cream or not. It's not a mean or menacing smile. It's not a smile that says
I'm better than you
or
I'm going to get a lot of pleasure out of hurting you
. It's not a smile that says
You'd better watch out because one of these days...
It's not a smile you'd ever expect to see on Jojo's face. It's a smile that says
I made you happy, and I'm glad
.

His mother beckons to him, and he goes to her. She crooks her finger, and he bends down. She kisses him on the cheek, and Jojo smiles. I wonder what Ardell would say about that.

Ardell is out on his porch again the next morning. I see him sitting there with a mug of coffee and the newspaper. But the newspaper is folded on his lap. He doesn't read it. He doesn't go through the employment ads. He's probably afraid that if he looks at the newspaper, he will miss Jojo.

People are watching. Quite a few people on my street work. Some, like my mother, work during the day. My mother is up at five thirty in the morning on workdays, getting my
lunch ready before she leaves for the hospital, where she is a cleaner. She starts at seven in the morning and finishes at three thirty. If they ask her to stay on for an extra shift or even a few extra hours, she always says yes. “It's not like we don't need the money,” she says.

Other people on the street work in the evening. Some work at night. And a lot of people don't work at all—they're too old or they're sick or they got hurt and can't work anymore. Some can't find a job. Some have given up looking. Some, like me, are waiting for summer to end. I'd rather be working, but just try to find a job when you've got a cast on your foot, even a walking cast like mine, and you have to tell your boss that you can't stand all day. At least school will give me something to do.

No matter what time of day it is, there are always people sitting on their porches, or standing on the sidewalk talking to other people, or across the street on their neighbors' porches, drinking coffee and talking. Because it's one of those nice July mornings—not too hot, and there's a breeze—a lot of people are
outside. So a lot of people see Shana come up the street pushing a stroller.

Shana doesn't live on our street anymore, but her parents do. They live on the opposite side of the street from Jojo's mother, but half a block up. Shana comes every week to see them. She gets off the bus up at the corner where the stores are. She's so pretty that usually another passenger—nine times out of ten it's a man—helps her get the stroller off the bus. Then she walks up the street, pushing the stroller and showing off her son to everyone who happens to be outside. Most of the time she stops by Jojo's mother's house to visit Jojo's mother. Shana's parents don't like this. They don't like it at all. But Shana tells them that her son has the right to see all of his grandparents, not just some of them.

Everyone who is outside that day, including Ardell and me, watches Shana push that stroller up the street. Everyone is wondering if she will stop at Jojo's mother's house. Everyone is wondering if she even knows that Jojo is back. Maybe her parents
haven't told her. Maybe they don't want her to know. Maybe they want to protect her and the baby.

Shana pushes the stroller to the end of the walk that leads to Jojo's mother's house. She looks up at the bright blue front door, the gleaming windows and the crisp white curtains. My mother says Jojo's mother is house-proud. Shana looks from the house to her son. She wheels the stroller onto the front walk and pushes it right up to the porch steps. She leaves it there at the bottom of the steps and goes up alone to ring the doorbell.

Jojo answers.

I'm on my porch, which is right next to Jojo's porch. There's just a small railing that separates them. I'm sitting there, catching the breeze and reading a magazine I borrowed from the library. I keep my head down, as if I'm still reading, but I can hear everything that's happening. I watch too, without being obvious about it.

I see Ardell, across the street, stand up and come to his porch railing so that he can get a better view of Jojo's mother's house.

I see Jojo look at Shana, his eyes wide, like he can't believe she is standing there at his door. I see him look around her and down the steps to the stroller. I see something I never thought I'd ever see. I see Shana smile at Jojo and say, “Do you want to meet your son?”

Jojo stares at her. More than anything, he looks surprised—maybe by the fact that Shana is even there after he pushed her that time, or maybe by the fact of his little son. He says, “I heard you named him Benjamin.” Benjamin is the name of one of Shana's grandfathers.

Shana reaches for Jojo's hand. She catches it and leads him down the steps. She bends over to undo the buckle on the harness that's holding her son in the stroller. Then things get complicated.

The first thing that happens is that Ardell comes off his porch and crosses the street.

“My brother is in the hospital in a coma from defending you from that piece of garbage,” he says to Shana. “If my brother hadn't helped you, that piece of garbage would have hurt you, and that baby might not
even have been born. That piece of garbage isn't fit to be anyone's father.”

Jojo just looks at him.

“But he
is
someone's father,” Shana says.

Then Shana's father appears. I'm not sure how or even where he comes from because I've been looking over at Jojo's mother's house. But there he is, grabbing the stroller with the baby still in it and trying to turn it around. Shana puts her hands on the stroller's handles to stop him, but he pushes her away.

Jojo steps forward just like that, like it's an automatic thing, like he isn't even thinking about it. Shana's father, who has gray hair and deep wrinkles on his forehead, looks evenly at Jojo and says, “You going to put me in a coma too?”

Jojo throws his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He steps back a pace. I look up and down the street and see surprise on every face.

Every face except Ardell's. Ardell's eyes are filled with hate.

Shana bends down again, and this time she undoes the harness that's holding
Benjamin in. She picks him up and holds him out to Jojo. Jojo looks at Shana's father. He looks at Ardell. Then he looks at Benjamin. The boy smiles at Jojo. Jojo stretches out his arms, and the next thing you know, the most notorious person on my street seems amazed to find himself holding a chubby little boy. His very own son. He smiles at the child. His son smiles back. Then, looking embarrassed, Jojo hands him back to Shana. She buckles the boy back into the stroller.

“How's your mother?” she says when she straightens up again.

Jojo just shrugs.

Shana looks at her father, all sharp-faced and angry. She says to Jojo, “Tell her I'll come by next week.”

Jojo nods.

Shana takes control of the stroller. She pushes it past Ardell, who says, “My brother is in a coma, and for what? For what?”

Shana's father puts a protective arm around Shana. He looks like he's as angry with Ardell as he is with Jojo. I hear him tell Shana, “You should stay away from here for a while.”

Shana doesn't answer. She pushes the stroller down the sidewalk toward the house where she grew up. Jojo watches her. Then he goes back inside, leaving Ardell alone on the sidewalk.

Ardell glowers up at Jojo's mother's house. He wants to get even with Jojo. I can see it. Everyone can see it.

Ardell goes three times a week most weeks to see his brother in the hospital. Ardell's mother goes four times a week most weeks, on the days Ardell doesn't go. Sometimes the two of them go together.

Ardell's father, who moved out of the house over a year ago, never goes. He told Ardell's mother, “What's the point? You heard what they said. He's never going to change.” He told her, “We should let
him go.” That's when Ardell's mother decided to let Ardell's father go instead.

A week after Jojo gets out and comes back to live in his mother's house, the word on the street is this: Ardell's father has talked to Eden's doctor. Everybody already knows that Eden has irreversible brain damage. Everyone already knows that Eden probably won't come out of his coma. Now Ardell's father has talked to the doctor about turning off all the machines and letting Eden go.

This makes Ardell furious. He curses his father up and down the street.

“Let him go?” he says. “He means kill him. He means pull the plug. He calls himself a father. He says he just has Eden's best interests at heart. But he never goes to see him. Eden is already dead to him, and now he wants to make it official. He wants to kill him.”

People talk about it all up and down the street.

People say, “If it's true what the doctors say, if he's never going to wake up, isn't it better to just let him go?”

Other people say, “He's alive. He's been alive for two years. You never know what medical science will be able to do a year or two or even five years from now. What if they pull the plug and then six months from now they come up with something that could have helped him? What then?”

Still other people say, “Jojo Benn should have been locked up for the rest of his life for what he did. He as good as killed that boy. An eye for an eye, that's what the Bible says. An eye for an eye.”

Ardell never comes out and says it, but everyone knows that he's an eye-for-aneye kind of person, at least where Jojo is concerned. He wants his brother to live. He wants his brother to wake up. But more than anything, he wants Jojo to pay for what he did. Instead Jojo is living right across the street in his mother's house. Every morning, Ardell is there to see Jojo come out, pick up the newspaper off the porch and carry it back inside to his mother. Every day, Ardell sees Jojo walk down to the store to buy food for his mother.

And then something happens.

Ardell's father arrives in his dusty old car. He parks it at the curb and starts up the walk to the porch. Ardell is out on the porch watching Jojo's mother's house. He blocks his father's way. Everyone on the street can hear him clearly as he says to his father, “Where do you think you're going?”

Ardell's father talks more quietly than Ardell. I only know what he said because one of Ardell's next-door neighbors told me. Ardell's father says, “I'm here to see your mother.”

“She doesn't want to talk to you,” Ardell says.

“It's important,” his father says. “It's about your brother.”

“He's still alive, if that's what you want to know,” Ardell says.

Ardell's father shakes his head. He tries to get around Ardell, but Ardell is like a star basketball player. He keeps blocking his father.

Then the door to Jojo's mother's house opens, and Jojo steps out onto the porch.
He's carrying a big cotton shopping bag that his mother always takes with her when she goes shopping. Jojo's mother doesn't like to bring things home in plastic shopping bags. She says she doesn't believe in that.

At the same time, my mother comes to the door and says to me, “We're out of milk. Be an angel—go to the store and get me some.” She hands me some money and goes back inside. She doesn't even notice what's going on on the other side of the street.

Ardell's father has seen Jojo. He has turned around one hundred and eighty degrees, as if he's completely forgotten that he has been trying to get into the house to see his wife. Instead, he's staring at Jojo. His jaw hangs open. Without taking his eyes off Jojo, he says to Ardell, “What's
he
doing here? What's that murderer doing back here?”

Ardell turns on his father the same hate-filled eyes he uses on Jojo. Ardell's neighbor, who saw the whole thing up close, said that you could tell Ardell was conflicted. On the one hand, he hated his father for calling Jojo a murderer because the person his father meant
as the murder victim was Eden, and Eden wasn't dead. Ardell was fighting alongside his mother to keep Eden alive. But, on the other hand, somewhere deep inside, it looked like maybe Ardell knew his father was right, that Eden might never wake up, because he put a hand on his father's shoulder, and instead of arguing with him, he said, “He's here, but he's not staying.” The neighbor who heard this isn't shy about repeating it all up and down the street.