The floor of the shop did not move. The building, which had stood on Pennsylvania Avenue since before the riots and had held a barber’s chair since 1961, did not move. But something in Leon moved, some old foundation stone he had built the whole second half of his life on top of, and he felt it give the way you feel a stair that isn’t there in the dark.
“I know this key.”
He did not mean to look at the mirror. His eyes went there on their own, down to the lower corner, to the woman in the white robe laughing at something nobody else would ever see. Jayden followed his look, the way children always follow the looks of grown-ups, quick as sparrows, and his face changed.
“Grandma?”
Leon did not answer. He could not have answered if the governor had walked in and asked. For twenty-four years this key, or its twin, had hung on Loretta’s ring between her house key and the key to the Buick, and every time it jingled he had known what it was without ever thinking about it: her locker at church. Her choir locker at Bethel Hope, down in the basement, where she kept her robe and her hymnals and her good shoes. Four years ago, the week after the funeral, he had gone through her purse to find it so he could give it back to the church, and it had not been there. He had looked in her coat pockets, her jewelry box, the junk drawer, the glove compartment. He had told himself she must have returned it herself, near the end, because that was the kind of woman she was, a woman who returned things. He had let it go. He had let a great many things go, that year, because holding them had been more than he could manage.
The bell rang a second time, properly now, and Tasha came in out of the October afternoon with the cold still on her. She was thirty-four, tall the way her mother had been tall, with her long braids pulled back and falling down the back of a camel coat she had not bothered to button. She had clearly run from wherever she’d left the car, because she was breathing hard and one of her heels was in her hand instead of on her foot. Her eyes swept the shop once—the stilled clippers, the turned heads, the murmuring television—and found her son, and then found what lay in her father’s open palm.
“Jayden! Give me the key.”