Tasha, a step ahead of him, turned.
“Your mother had choir practice on Tuesdays,” he said. “Twenty-some years. Every Tuesday night at seven. She’d come home at nine-thirty with her robe in a dry cleaning bag.” He looked at the door on the right. One of the women inside, the older one, glanced up and met his eyes for a moment, and then went politely back to her conversation. “She always took the robe,” he said. “Every week. So I’d see it.”
Tasha looked at the sign on the door and then at her father. She did not say anything. She did not have to.
They went on down the hall.
The choir room was long and narrow, with a battered upright piano at one end and three rows of chairs facing it and a rolling rack of white and gold robes along one wall, each in its own plastic bag. Along the opposite wall stood a bank of wooden lockers, painted that institutional green that seemed to exist only in schools and churches and hospitals, sixteen of them in two rows of eight, each with a small brass plate screwed into the door. The paint was chipped at the edges and thick with layers. Somebody had stuck a gold star sticker on number 12. Number 7 was on the top row, at about the height of Leon’s chin.
He stood in front of it with the key in his hand.
The whine in his ears had come back, softer now. His heart was going hard. He thought of all the times in thirty-five years he had stood outside a door Loretta was on the other side of—the bathroom door when she was crying and didn’t want him to see; the delivery room door at Maryland General, before they let him in; the door of her room at hospice, the last night, when the nurse asked him to give her a minute to make Loretta comfortable, and he had stood in the hallway in his apron, because he had come straight from the shop, and had listened to his wife’s breath through the wood.