Jayden took the rabbit and examined it critically, the bald patches, the stitched red X.
“He looks like he went to war,” he said.
And Leon Carter, standing in the fellowship hall of Bethel Hope A.M.E. Church with his dead wife’s letter against his heart, surprised everyone, himself most of all, by laughing—a cracked, wet, helpless bark of a laugh that went on longer than it should have and turned at the end into something else, and Odessa came around the table and held on to him, and Tasha held on to him, and Jayden, not understanding, but understanding enough, put his arms around his grandfather’s waist with the rabbit squashed between them, and held on too.
*
Tasha and Jayden slept at the rowhouse on Whitelock Street that night, in the room that had been Tasha’s and was now a room full of Loretta’s sewing things and a treadmill nobody used. Jayden fell asleep in his clothes with Mr. Hoppity under his chin. Tasha lay down beside him and was asleep within minutes, the way people sleep after a week of not sleeping.
Leon did not sleep. At two in the morning he was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, as he had sat at two in the morning on March 14, 1998, and he understood that he had chosen the chair and the hour on purpose, though he could not have said what the purpose was.
The bag sat on the table in front of him. He had counted the money three times. One thousand one hundred and forty dollars. He had laid the two tickets side by side under the stove light. He had read all twenty-four index cards again, in order, and then the letter, and then the cards again.