“Why’d you say it like that?”
She looked at him oddly. “Like what?”
“Like you said it. ‘If Dad comes home early.’ That’s a strange way to put it. Why not, if Dad’s home? If Dad’s there?”
For a long moment his daughter only looked at him. And then something passed over her face that he would think about for the rest of his life—an expression so young it seemed to come from another decade, an expression that belonged on the face of a five-year-old girl with ribbons on the ends of her plaits.
“Because that’s what Mama said,” Tasha said. “That’s how she said it. ‘If Daddy comes home early, baby, you go on over to Miss Odom’s. Don’t knock on the front. Go round the back. She’ll know.’”
The whine in Leon’s ears stopped. Everything stopped.
“You don’t remember,” his daughter said. It was not a question. It was not even, quite, an accusation. It was something sadder than either—a thing she had suspected for a long time and was only now allowing herself to know. “You really don’t remember. All those afternoons. I used to sit at Miss Odom’s kitchen table and she’d give me Kool-Aid in the jelly glass with the Flintstones on it and turn up the TV, and I’d listen for your car. I knew the sound of your car better than I knew my own name. I knew if you parked crooked.”