Now about Andre.
I know you, so I know what you are feeling right now, and I need you to put it down. I’m serious. Put it down on the floor of the choir room and leave it there.
I knew that boy was carrying what you carried the day I met him. You know how you can tell a man’s been in a chair before by how he sits in yours? It was like that. When he walked into the Step Group in 2017 I wasn’t surprised. I was relieved. I sat with him outside by the side door after and I told him all of it, everything I’ve just told you, and he cried like a child. And I made him a deal like the one I made myself on the Number 13. I gave him a key to this locker. I told him: if you ever pick up again, you give this key to my daughter with your own hand. Don’t make her find out from a bottle in the truck. Don’t make her find out from a phone call. You hand it to her and you tell her to take it to her father.
He asked me why her father. I said because her father is the only man I know who has walked out the other end of this. And because I want my daughter to have what I had—a door—but I don’t want her to have to carry it alone the way I did, all those years, in a church basement, lying to everybody she loved about Tuesday nights. I want the door to be in your hands, Leon. Yours. Because you know the way back through it.
That boy is not you, and he is not my daddy, and he is not a sure thing. Nobody is. But he gave her the key. If you are reading this, he gave her the key, and that means there is somebody in him who knows. The crying meant that for you. The key means it for him.
Don’t you go after Andre Whitaker with your hands. I mean it. Go after him the way Zeke went after you. Put on your hat. Knock on the door. Sit beside him.
And as for our girl: she’s going to have to decide for herself, the same as I did. Don’t decide for her. Don’t let her decide it once and think it’s done, either. It’s never done. You decide it every year. That’s the only way it was ever worth anything.