When Tasha had called her from the shop, Odessa had said only, “I’ll be there,” and hung up.
Now she looked at Leon, and at Tasha, and at Jayden, who was holding his mother’s hand and staring up at the bell tower as if he suspected it of something. Then she held out her small hand, palm up, and Leon understood and laid the brass key in it. Odessa looked at it for a long time. She turned it over and touched the stamped letters with her thumb, B.H., the way you might touch a name on a gravestone.
“Well,” she said finally, and handed it back. “Took you long enough, Leon Carter.”
“You knew,” Leon said.
“I knew there was a locker, and I knew whose it was, and I knew that boy came by the church office the first of every month for four years and put a five-dollar bill in my hand for the rent on it and never missed once. Not even this summer.” She lifted her chin at him. “What’s in it is not mine to tell. Loretta made me swear, and I don’t break promises to the dead. They’ve got too much time on their hands to come back and fuss.” She turned to Jayden, and her face softened into something Leon had seen her give to a thousand children at a thousand Vacation Bible Schools. “Young man, I happen to have a pound cake upstairs in the fellowship hall that has been waiting a very long time for somebody to eat it. Do you think you could help me with that while your mother and your grandfather take care of some business?”
Jayden looked at his mother. Tasha nodded. And Leon, watching Odessa lead his grandson away up the half-flight of stairs toward the fellowship hall, heard her say over her shoulder, to nobody in particular, “Seventeen years late. I suppose that’s close enough to count.”
The basement of Bethel Hope smelled the way church basements smell everywhere: burnt coffee and floor wax and old hymnals and, faintly, the ghosts of ten thousand fried chicken dinners. A long hallway ran the length of the building under fluorescent tubes, one of which was flickering. Doors opened off it on both sides: the kitchen, the nursery with its painted Noah’s Ark, the Sunday school rooms, the boiler room. At the far end was a door with a laminated sign that said CHOIR — PLEASE RETURN ROBES TO HANGERS.