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Meanwhile, Jojo comes down his front walk with his mother's shopping bag. I decide to follow him. After all, my mom wants me to go to the store for milk.

I clomp down the sidewalk behind Jojo, moving slowly because of my walking cast. Jojo keeps his eyes straight ahead. If he knows I'm behind him, he doesn't let on. He goes to the small grocery store on the corner. It happens to be the same store I'm going to. It's not one of those chain grocery stores, but it sells everything we ever need, and my mother says the prices are fair.

Jojo goes into the store. Mr. Brisebois,
who owns the store and who you always see first thing up there at the cash, turns to look at him. As soon as he sees Jojo, he beckons to one of his daughters, who all work at the store. She comes and replaces him at the cash. Mr. Brisebois makes his way out from behind the counter and trails Jojo up and down the aisles. He does it right out in the open. He doesn't even try to pretend that he isn't following Jojo. I guess I can't blame him.

Mr. Brisebois is like a lot of the store owners in my neighborhood. He knows a lot of stores can't be bothered to set up here because people don't have a lot of money. He also knows that a lot of people don't have cars and that it's a pain to take the bus to go grocery shopping. So he knows he can make a good living here. But he's also wary. He knows that there are a lot of good, honest people in the neighborhood. But there are also people who aren't so good or honest. Some of them, like Jojo back before he sent Eden Withrow to the hospital, have given Mr. Brisebois a hard time. So Mr. Brisebois isn't shy. When people like Jojo come into his store, he follows them to
make sure that they don't steal anything. Or he makes them so uncomfortable that they go somewhere else where maybe they can get away with stealing.

Jojo reaches for some cans of tomatoes. That's when he sees Mr. Brisebois standing behind him. Jojo straightens up. He turns and looks at Mr. Brisebois. Jojo is taller and bulkier than Mr. Brisebois. He's younger and in better shape. People are actually afraid of Jojo. No one is afraid of Mr. Brisebois, other than being afraid he might call the cops.

Mr. Brisebois stands his ground. He looks Jojo in the eye. He's not giving an inch, but he has one hand behind his back, and I can see that it's shaking.

Jojo looks at Mr. Brisebois. Then he walks a little farther down the aisle and pulls a package of dried spaghetti off the shelf. Mr. Brisebois is right with him. He follows Jojo to the cheese aisle, where Jojo picks up a can of shake-on Parmesan cheese. Then to the bread aisle, where Jojo picks up a loaf of crusty bread. Then to the produce aisle, where he picks up tomatoes, lettuce, a green
pepper, some green onions and some garlic. Jojo carries it all to the cash, where Mr. Brisebois's daughter rings it through. The whole time, Mr. Brisebois watches her, and Jojo acts like Mr. Brisebois isn't there. He packs all the groceries in his mother's cloth shopping bag. He pays. He leaves the store.

Mr. Brisebois puts a hand on the counter and watches Jojo go through the door. He uses that hand to steady himself. He is perspiring a lot. He says to his daughter, “That one is no good. I wish he would shop somewhere else.”

Mr. Brisebois's daughter says, “Why don't you tell him that?”

Mr. Brisebois goes back behind the cash to ring up my container of milk. His hands are shaking as he makes change from the bill my mother gave me.

“That one is no good,” he says again. “Now that he's back, they'll all be back. Things will change.”

Things do change. But they don't change the way Mr. Brisebois thinks.

Back before Jojo was sent away, he used to hang out with guys who were just like him. They were big and smart-assed and into stuff they shouldn't have been. They had swagger and muscle and liked to use them both. They acted like they were in charge, like they were better than everyone else. They took what they wanted, and they dared you to do something about it.

Some people did do something. They called the cops for stuff like shoplifting. Something bad usually happened to people who ratted on Jojo. Their windows got broken or a fire broke out in their back alleys or someone dragged a nail up and down the sides of their cars. No one ever saw those things happen. The cops asked questions, but they never made an arrest because they were never able to prove anything. So after a while, if Jojo or one of his friends wanted a pack of smokes, they got it, free. If they wanted an ice cream from the ice-cream truck, they got it, until the guy who owned the ice-cream truck stopped coming around the neighborhood. The people who gave them free stuff called it insurance—you pay to insure that nothing bad is going to happen. Nothing bad that you can't prove and that the cops can't do anything about, but that leaves you out of produce or with expensive repairs to do and that scares you or your wife or kids.

Before I know it, Jojo has been back for a week, and apart from that one day,
his friends don't come around. Jojo mostly stays at home. The weather stays nice, so he takes meals out to his mother, who sits out back under the big umbrella, sleeping. I hear kitchen sounds—pots and dishes—through the open window. I smell cooking smells. And still Jojo's mother is outside under that umbrella, which means that Jojo is doing the cooking. I hear the vacuum run in Jojo's house and see his mother outside under that umbrella, which means that Jojo is doing the cleaning. I have to think that over—Jojo doing all the housework. It makes me wonder what it must have been like where he has been. It makes me wonder what might have happened to him in there.

A few more days go by, and still Jojo's friends don't show up.

But Ardell's friends do.

Ardell has a lot of friends, and they have all grown in the time since Jojo was sent away. They are big and strong, but people don't see them as troublemakers. Mr. Brisebois doesn't follow any of them around his store. People never watch them and wonder what they are
going to do. At least not until one morning two weeks after Jojo has been back.

That day Jojo comes out of the house. Ardell is across the street on his porch, as usual, except that the porch is crowded with Ardell's friends. They all come down off the porch behind Ardell. I count them—there are nine of them in addition to Ardell. They fall into line behind Jojo.

That gets people's attention up and down the street. It gets my attention too. I start to follow them. A lot of other people do too. Some of them follow directly behind Ardell and his friends. Others follow on the other side of the street, like me. But we all end up in the same place. We all end up on the sidewalk outside Mr. Brisebois's grocery store.

This time Ardell doesn't stay behind Jojo. Instead, he hurries around him and blocks his way into the store. His friends stand in a circle around Jojo.

All of Ardell's friends are tensed up. So is Ardell. Everyone is watching, even Mr. Brisebois, through the window of his store. Jojo just stands there. For a couple
of moments he looks at Ardell. Then, very slowly, he turns around, the full three hundred and sixty degrees, looking at all nine of Ardell's friends one by one, until finally he is looking at Ardell again. For the first time since he has come back, Jojo says something in public.

“I don't want trouble,” he says. “I just came to get some groceries.”

Ardell doesn't move. He looks hard at Jojo. “You're not welcome here,” he says.

Jojo looks over his right shoulder, and the guys who are standing on that side of him tense up, like they are afraid Jojo is going to lash out at them. Jojo looks over his left shoulder, and the guys who are standing on that side tense up. Then he looks at Ardell.

“If you want groceries,” Ardell says, “you're going to have to go somewhere else to get them.”

Behind Ardell, Mr. Brisebois moves from the window to the door of his store. He turns the lock and flips over the
OPEN
sign so that now it says
CLOSED, please call again
. Ardell smiles when he sees
that. Mr. Brisebois moves back, away from the door.

“Looks like there are no groceries in there for you,” Ardell says.

He pushes Jojo. The palms of both hands slam into Jojo's chest. Jojo stumbles backward. Someone sticks out a foot. Jojo trips on it and lands on his butt on the pavement. All the guys with Ardell laugh. Then Ardell kicks Jojo, hard. Someone else moves in and swings back a leg, but Jojo scrambles to his feet and darts between two of Ardell's friends so that now he's on the outside of the circle instead of on the inside. Ardell and his friends turn to go after him.

Then a double miracle happens. The first part of the miracle: a cop car slides around the corner with two cops in it, both of them with their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, but you know they are taking note of everything. The cops who ride through my neighborhood are always on the lookout for things that don't look right. A bunch of big muscle guys moving down the street after just one guy doesn't look right.

The second part of the miracle: the cop car doesn't mean trouble for Jojo. This time, maybe for the first time, the cops actually save Jojo. Ardell hangs back. Ardell's friends hang back. Jojo stumbles down the street to his mother's house. After the cop car disappears, people start to jeer, but by then Jojo is safe inside.

After the day when Ardell and his friends made a circle around Jojo, it seems that no one has anything better to do than be out there on the street to see what will happen next. Will Jojo call up his old friends? Will they come over and back him up the way they used to before he went away? Will it come down to Ardell on one side of the street and Jojo on the other, each with his own gang of friends? Will it come down to a real battle—and if it does, who will win? And then what will happen?

The next day Jojo doesn't come out of the house at all. I go out back at my house and look over the fence. Jojo's mother doesn't come out either, even though it's one of those nice days, warm but not too hot, not sticky either, with a nice breeze to cool you down.

The day after that, late in the afternoon, after everyone has seen Ardell and his mother walk down to the bus together, Jojo shows his face. He walks down the street to where the stores are. People drift down the street after him, as if they are curious about something. But what? Ardell isn't there. Nothing can happen. But people follow, which makes me curious. So I follow the people who are following Jojo.

Jojo walks directly to Mr. Brisebois's grocery store. Just as he gets to the door, Mr. Brisebois turns the lock and flips the sign in the door to
CLOSED
. Jojo looks through the glass at him. Then he looks down the block to the convenience store. He starts to walk toward it. Before he gets there, a
CLOSED
sign appears in the window. Three blocks down, there's a small fruit and vegetable
store. It's always open, even on holidays when Mr. Brisebois's store is closed. But by the time Jojo gets to it, it's closed. Jojo hammers on the door. No one answers.

Jojo turns and looks at all the people who are watching him. A kid picks up a rock and throws it at him. He misses, but that's not the main thing. The main thing is that there are adults watching too. Lots of them. And not one of them says a word to the kid.

The whole way back to his mother's house, Jojo keeps looking over his shoulder. He disappears inside.

The day after that, the bus stops at the end of the street. Shana gets out with her baby—Jojo's baby—in the stroller. She has two big bags with her. She stashes one on the rack underneath where the boy sits. She slings the other one over her shoulder. It bulges and looks heavy. She pushes the stroller up the street on the same side as her parents' house. Of course everyone thinks that's where she's going. She's going to see her parents.

But before she gets to Ardell's house, she crosses the street and pushes the stroller up
the walk to Jojo's mother's house. She leaves the stroller at the bottom of the porch steps and takes the two big bags up to the door. She presses the doorbell, and the door opens. She hands the two bags inside and then goes back down the steps. This time she picks up the stroller and carries it up onto the porch and into the house. The door closes behind her.

Up and down the street, people are staring at Jojo's mother's front door. Ardell is staring the hardest. He comes down off his porch and marches himself to Shana's parents' house. The next thing you know, Shana's father comes out of his house, crosses the street to Jojo's mother's house and presses the doorbell half a dozen times. When no one answers, he hammers on the door. Ardell is standing at the bottom of the porch steps, watching him.

“My brother is in the hospital because of him,” Ardell says. “And because of her.”

“You think
I
like this?” Shana's father says. “You think I like that my grandson has
him
for a father? I would rather she'd never had that baby. I—”

Shana is standing in the open door. Jojo is behind her. I can see that he's holding Benjamin in his arms.

“What are you doing here, Papa?” Shana says.

Shana's father grabs her by the arm and drags her out onto the porch.

“What are
you
doing here?” he says.

Shana looks at her father. Shana is so pretty. People around here say she should enter one of those top model contests. They say she would win for sure. I know that Shana's father thinks so too. He has always been proud of her. He always called her “my little girl,” right up until she got pregnant with Jojo's baby. But he loves her—you can tell by the way he looks at her. And now he says all the time that the child looks just like its mother, and you can tell that makes him happy. My mother says she's sure it would be different if every time Shana's father looked at his grandson, he found himself looking at Jojo. She says the thing that saves that child from being an outcast in his own family is that he doesn't look anything like his daddy.