Leon put the card down on his knee. Down the hall, faintly, through the open door of the Step Group room, a dozen voices were saying together the words he had said in rooms like that a thousand times, the words he had said on a cold March morning in 1998 with Ezekiel Booker’s hand on his back: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. And from the room across the hall, softer, from fewer voices, the same words, in the room where his wife had sat every Tuesday night for twenty-four years while he believed she was singing.
*
The manila envelope held six pages of the yellow Rite Aid paper, written on both sides. Leon read it in the choir room under the hum of the fluorescent light, with his daughter on the floor at his feet holding a one-eyed rabbit, and the voices of two meetings murmuring at him from down the hall like water moving under ice.
Leon,
I have started this letter eleven times. Odessa says if I start it a twelfth she is going to take away my pen. So here it is, the plain way, the way you always said you liked things. Plain as a flat top.
On the thirteenth of March in 1998, you came home from the Sportsman’s at ten minutes after four in the afternoon. I know the time because I looked at the clock on the stove when I heard your car, and I said to myself, Loretta, remember this time, because this is the time everything changes one way or the other. Tasha was next door at Mavis Odom’s, where she had been most afternoons for two years, because I had worked out with Mavis that if you came home early, she would keep our baby until I came for her. You never asked about it. I used to be angry that you never asked. Later I was grateful.
You came in the kitchen and you wanted to know where your daughter was. I told you she was at Mavis’s. You said why is my daughter always at Mavis’s, is there something wrong with her own house. You were loud. You were always loud by then. And then you said a thing I am not going to write down here, because you don’t remember saying it and you don’t need to carry it, and I have carried it long enough that I have worn it down to nothing. And I answered you back. I had never answered you back before. And you put your fist through the wall beside my head.