Tasha’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland, the raised seal still crisp. Loretta’s own birth certificate, from North Carolina. Her Social Security card. Her license to practice as a licensed practical nurse, issued by the Maryland Board of Nursing. A photograph of Loretta’s sister Bernice standing in front of a white house with green shutters, and on the back, in Bernice’s hand: Durham. Anytime. I mean it. And a bundle of cash, held with a paper band from the Provident Bank of Maryland: twenties, tens, and fives, all of them the old kind, the kind he hadn’t seen in a quarter century, with the small presidents in their small ovals. He did not count it then. Later, at his kitchen table, he would count it three times, and it would come to one thousand one hundred and forty dollars every time.
And between the birth certificates, two tickets.
They were Greyhound tickets, the old printed kind on stiff card stock, from the terminal on West Fayette Street, the old downtown terminal that had not been a terminal in a long time. Baltimore, Maryland, to Durham, North Carolina, via Richmond. One adult. One child. Departing 11:40 P.M., March 13, 1998.
They had not been torn. They had not been punched. They had never been used.
Leon sat down heavily on one of the choir chairs. The folding chair creaked under him. He held the two tickets in his fingers, very carefully, as though they might crumble, and read the date again, and again.
March 13, 1998.
He knew that date. He knew it the way other men know the date of their wedding or the day the war ended. It was the last day he had ever had a drink. His sobriety date. It was engraved on the bronze medallion he carried in his front pocket every day of his life—he could feel it there now, against his thigh, worn smooth—twenty-eight years and seven months ago. The day he had come home in the afternoon and put his fist through the kitchen wall. The night he had woken on the kitchen floor at one in the morning in an empty house. The morning Ezekiel Booker had knocked on his door at seven a.m. and said, Get your coat, son, you and me are going for a ride, and had driven him to a church basement on North Avenue and sat beside him in a folding chair while Leon shook.