Neither of them moved. Upstairs, faintly, through the floor, came the sound of Odessa’s laugh and Jayden’s, and the scrape of a chair. Down the hall, a door closed, and voices began, low and murmuring: a meeting starting, somebody reading something aloud in the singsong cadence of words read aloud a thousand times.
Leon reached in and took out the bag. It weighed almost nothing. He set it on one of the choir chairs. Tasha lifted out the bundle of envelopes and the manila envelope with her father’s name and laid them on the chair beside it. They looked at the bag. Then Leon unclipped the paper clip and drew the zipper open.
The smell came out first: cedar, and dust, and very faintly, unmistakably, the cocoa butter lotion Loretta had used every night of her life. It hit him like a hand in the chest.
Inside, folded with a nurse’s neatness, were clothes. A woman’s blouse, cream-colored with small blue flowers, that he remembered her wearing to his cousin Darnell’s wedding in 1995. A pair of navy slacks. Underthings, folded small. A pair of white nurse’s shoes. And below them, smaller: a child’s pink cardigan with pearl buttons, size 5T. A pair of child’s corduroy overalls. Two pairs of small white socks with lace at the ankle, rolled into balls. A child’s toothbrush, purple, in a plastic travel case. And, tucked down along the side, a stuffed rabbit, gray, worn nearly bald, one black button eye gone and a careful X of red thread stitched in its place.
Tasha made a sound. It was not a word. She reached into the bag and took the rabbit out and held it in both hands and looked at it, and her face crumpled, and uncrumpled, and crumpled again.
“Mr. Hoppity,” she said. “This is Mr. Hoppity. I thought I lost him. I was five. I thought I left him at the bus—” She stopped. “I cried for a week. Mama said we’d look for him. She said he probably went on a trip.”
Under the clothes, at the very bottom of the bag, flat, was a gallon Ziploc bag gone cloudy with age. Leon lifted it out. Inside it were papers and money. He opened it on his knee.