He drove up the Sunday morning in the Buick with his clipper case on the passenger seat. It was a long, low building of tan brick at the end of a curving drive lined with maples that had gone fully red, and on the back patio, among the round metal tables and the visitors in their church clothes, Andre Whitaker was sitting alone, waiting for no one, because no one had told him anyone was coming.
When he saw Leon walk out through the glass doors, he stood up so fast his chair fell over.
He was thirty-nine years old and looked older. He had lost weight. His hair had grown out shaggy and uneven over two weeks, and his beard had come in patchy, and his hands, when he finally lifted them halfway as if to show they were empty, shook a little. He looked at the clipper case in Leon’s hand and then back at Leon’s face, and Leon saw him decide to stand there and take whatever was coming, and that, more than anything, was what made Leon set the case down on the table.
“Pick up your chair, son,” Leon said. “Sit down.”
Andre picked up the chair. He sat. Leon sat across from him. For a while neither of them said anything. A woman at the next table was holding hands with a young man in a gray sweatshirt and crying quietly. Somewhere a child was running in circles on the grass.
“I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” Andre said finally. His voice was rough. “Not because I’m not. Because you’ve heard it. Everybody’s heard it. I’ve been saying it to the ceiling for two weeks. It doesn’t mean anything coming out of my mouth right now.”