He did not answer. She took that as permission.
“Thursday morning, the morning after, I came downstairs and Andre was sitting at the kitchen table. He hadn’t slept. He looked like—” She searched for it. “He looked like somebody had let all the air out of him. He had his keys out on the table, the whole ring, and he was working one of them off. It took him a long time. His hands were shaking. And when he got it off he slid it across the table to me, and he said, ‘Your mother gave me this. She told me if I ever picked up again, I had to give it to you myself. Not let you find out. Give it to you myself, and tell you to take it to your father.’” Tasha’s mouth twisted. “And he gave me this.”
She drew her right hand out of her coat pocket. In it was an envelope, a plain white business envelope gone soft at the corners from handling, and on the front, in a slanting, looping hand that Leon would have known in the dark, in a hurricane, at the bottom of the sea, were the words: For Tasha. When Andre gives you the key.
Leon took it from her the way he would have taken a bird with a broken wing.
“I’ve read it fifty times,” Tasha said. “Read it.”
The envelope had been opened carefully along the top. Inside was a single sheet of the lined yellow paper Loretta had bought in bulk from the Rite Aid on Pennsylvania Avenue for as long as he had known her, folded in thirds. He unfolded it. The handwriting was the handwriting of a woman who had been a licensed practical nurse for thirty-one years, who had written thousands of chart notes at three in the morning in fluorescent hallways, fast and slanted and absolutely legible. But near the bottom it grew shakier. He knew when she had written this. He knew it by the shake.
Baby girl,