Vincent looked through the minivan window. Zoe had curled up against Gloria, still wearing her cleats. "So am I."
They reached Riverside Park after practice had already started. Gloria did not want to take the children straight home, because she suspected sitting alone with the memory would be worse. She also did not want to pretend nothing had happened. She asked each child whether they felt ready to join the team, made sure their parents knew the situation, and told them that going home was an acceptable choice.
Marcus said he wanted to play, although he looked at the parking lot repeatedly during the first drill. Lily stayed close to Amanda and declined to take the field. Zoe would not let go of Gloria's hand. In the end, Gloria and her daughter sat together on a bench beneath a maple tree while the practice continued around them. The sound of cleats scraping grass and a coach calling out directions seemed to come from a distant world.
"Did he think you were bad?" Zoe asked.
"I think he made assumptions about me without knowing me."
"Because you're Black?"
Gloria felt a hard ache behind her eyes. She could have told Zoe she was imagining things. She could have offered the comforting fiction that adults in uniforms always treated everybody the same. But Zoe had heard Hughes's words with her own ears, and children knew when reassurance was a disguise for dishonesty.
"I think that may have been part of it," she said. "And that was wrong."
"But Daddy is a police officer."
"Yes. There are many police officers who take their responsibilities seriously, including your dad. That doesn't mean every officer always does the right thing."
Zoe pulled at a loose thread on her sock. "If Daddy wasn't there, would he have taken you away?"
Gloria looked toward the far end of the field. She could not answer with certainty. The thought itself was unbearable. "I don't know, baby. I know people were recording, and I know I would have kept trying to get help."
Zoe pressed her forehead into Gloria's side. "I don't want to go back to that store."
"You don't have to today."