After a while he got up and went to the wall beside the refrigerator. In the plaster, at about the height of a woman’s head, was a rough patch the size of a dinner plate. He had patched it himself the week after, badly, because he had been shaking too hard to feather the edges, and it had been painted over five times since—yellow, then white, then a green Loretta called sage and he called hospital, then white again, then the cream it was now—and under every coat of paint, if you knew to look, if the light came in low from the window over the sink, you could still see it. A faint lumpy ghost in the wall. A place where the surface did not lie flat.
He had looked at it every morning for twenty-eight years while he made his coffee. He had thought it was his to look at. He had thought it was a private reminder, a debt between himself and God. He had never once thought about the fact that Loretta stood at that counter every morning too, slicing peaches, packing lunches, writing grocery lists on the back of envelopes, with the ghost of his fist at the height of her own head.
He put his palm flat against it. The plaster was cool.
“I’m sorry,” he said, out loud, to the wall, to the kitchen, to the cream-colored paint and everything under it. It was not enough. He knew it would never be enough. He said it anyway, because it was what there was.
He heard the stairs creak and did not turn around. Tasha came into the kitchen in her stocking feet, the camel coat pulled around her over her clothes like a bathrobe, and stood beside him and looked at the wall.
“I used to think there was a mouse in there,” she said. “When I was little. Because of the bump. I used to put my ear on it.”
Leon closed his eyes.