If you are holding this, then Andre kept his word, and I want you to remember that first, before anything else you’re feeling. He kept his word. That is not nothing. That is not everything either, but it is not nothing.
I need you to take the key to your father. Not to your Aunt Bernice, not to Pastor Willis, not to Odessa, not to anybody else. Your father. Go to locker number seven in the choir room at Bethel Hope and open it together. Don’t open it by yourself first, and don’t let him open it by himself. You will want to do one or the other. Don’t.
There are things in that locker I should have told your father while I was still above ground, and I didn’t, because I was too much of a coward or too much of something else I never found the right word for. I am sorry to put it on you. I am sorry to put any of this on you. But I have been a nurse long enough to know that some things you can’t hand somebody from a hospital bed. They have to find them.
Your father will know what to do about Andre. He’s the only man I ever knew who came all the way back. He doesn’t know that I know how far he had to come. He will.
I love you more than all the water in the Chesapeake.
Mama
P.S. Tell Odessa Lyles she still owes me a pound cake from the 2009 bake sale and I have not forgotten and neither has the Lord.