“I know.”
“She sat in a bus station for six hours with you in her lap, and I was on the kitchen floor.” He took his hands from his face. His eyes were red and terrible. “And I’ve been walking around for twenty-eight years like I did something. Like I was the one who did it.”
“You did do something,” his daughter said. “You stayed sober. Nobody did that for you. Not Mama, not Mr. Zeke. You did that every day.”
“She did it every year.”
“Then you both did.” Tasha came around and crouched in front of him and took his face in her hands, his bearded face, the way her mother used to. “Daddy. Look at me. You both did.”
Upstairs, Odessa Lyles was sitting at a long fellowship hall table across from a ten-year-old boy who had eaten three slices of pound cake and was beginning to show it, teaching him to play bid whist with a deck of cards so old the jokers had gone soft as cloth. When Leon and Tasha came up the stairs, carrying a navy blue vinyl bag and a one-eyed rabbit and a manila envelope and a bundle of twenty-four small white envelopes, Odessa took one look at Leon’s face and laid her cards down.
“She told you, then,” she said.