“Daddy.”
“I can’t. Your mama said don’t decide it for you, and she was right, and even if she hadn’t said it, I don’t have the right. I was the one on the floor, baby. I don’t get to tell you whether you should’ve gotten on the bus.”
Tasha put her face in her hands.
“But I’ll tell you what I know,” he said, and she looked up. “Your mama didn’t stay because staying was right. Read those cards. She didn’t know what was right. She stayed because she checked. Every year. She looked at the whole thing—at me, at what I was doing, at whether you were safe—and she checked. And the year I didn’t hold up, she’d have gone. I believe that now. I didn’t know it till tonight, but I believe it.” He laid his hand flat on the bag. “You don’t owe Andre staying. You don’t owe him leaving, either. What you owe is to yourself and to that boy upstairs. You owe it to check. And you don’t check once. You check every year for the rest of your life.”
“And what if I check and I’m wrong?”
“Then you’ll check again next year. That’s the whole thing. That’s all it ever was.”