He had always thought of that morning as the morning God came looking for him.
“Daddy,” Tasha said. She was sitting on the floor now, at his feet, the rabbit in her lap. “Daddy, what is it? What’s that date?”
He couldn’t tell her. Not yet. He put the tickets down very gently on the bag and picked up the bundle of envelopes, because he could not yet bring himself to open the one with his name on it.
The rubber band snapped when he touched it, dry as a dead leaf. The envelopes spilled across his lap. They were all the same kind, small white greeting-card envelopes, and each one had a date written on the front in Loretta’s hand, and every date was the same date in a different year. March 13, 1999. March 13, 2000. March 13, 2001. He sorted them with hands that were not entirely steady. Twenty-four envelopes. The last one said March 13, 2022. Six months before she died.
He opened the first.
Inside was a single index card, the kind she used for recipes, and in the center of it, in her slanting hand, she had written:
March 13, 1999. One year. He has 365 days. I have $1,140 and a bag and Bernice’s address. He doesn’t know where I was that night. He doesn’t know I watched the 11:40 pull out with my baby asleep on my lap and both our tickets in my hand. I came home. I’ve come down here every week for a year and sat in that room across the hall and listened to women talk about men just like him. I’m keeping the bag. Not today.