“I don’t know.”
Leon looked at him. It was the look he gave grown men who told him they wanted just a little off the top and then complained when it was a little. It was not a look he had ever given his grandson. He gave it anyway. Something had come up from very far down inside him at the sight of that brass and that number, something that did not have a name yet, and it was using his face without asking.
“No. You tell me what it opens.”
Jayden’s mouth worked and nothing came out of it. From the second chair, Odell Pettiford, who had never in eighty-one years allowed a silence to go unimproved, asked the boy with a wheezing chuckle whether he’d gone and lifted that off his daddy’s key ring—asked it the way old men tease, the way they themselves had been teased on porches seventy years before—and Jayden spun on him with his fists balled at his sides, the red of the hoodie making his whole face look redder.
“No, I didn’t!”
Odell raised both palms in surrender and sank back into the chair. Jayden turned back to his grandfather, and the words came out of him in a rush, tangled and too fast, the way a ten-year-old’s words do when he has been carrying them alone for blocks: that Mom took it off Dad’s keys last night, that she tied it on the string this morning before school, that she said it was Grandma’s lucky key and he had to keep it under his shirt, that she said if Dad’s truck was home when he got home he wasn’t supposed to go inside, he was supposed to come straight here, straight, no stopping at the corner store, and the truck was home, Grandpa, the truck was right there in front of the house.
Leon held out his hand. After a moment Jayden lifted the string over his head, catching it on one ear, and laid the key in his grandfather’s palm. It was warm from the boy’s skin. Leon closed his fingers over it and opened them again. He turned it over. On the back of the bow, in the same tiny stamp, were two letters: B.H.