Leon finished the last page and laid it face down on his knee with the others and put both of his big hands over his face.
He did not make any noise. That was the thing Tasha would remember later, the thing she would tell Andre about, months afterward, sitting in the car outside a different church. Her father did not make a sound. His shoulders shook and his chest heaved and his gray beard got wet between his fingers, but he did not make a single sound, as though even now, even here, some part of him was still a man coming home early to a quiet house, trying not to wake anyone.
She got up off the floor and put her arms around his neck from behind and pressed her face into the top of his head, the way she used to when she was small and he was sitting at the kitchen table and she wanted to climb on him. He smelled of talc and clipper oil and the cold. He reached up without looking and gripped her wrist.
They stayed like that until the meetings let out. They heard the chairs scraping, the voices in the hallway, someone laughing, someone saying see you next week, the side door opening and closing, opening and closing. Then it was quiet again except for the fluorescent tube, still flickering.
“I didn’t know,” Leon said finally, into his hands. “Tasha, I swear before God I did not know.”
“I know, Daddy.”
“I sat in this church every Christmas. Every Christmas. I read that program.”