“No,” Leon agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“He sat on those steps an hour and ten minutes.” Andre’s jaw worked. “Tasha told me. I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of it. That’s the part I can’t—” He stopped.
“I know,” Leon said. “I know that part.”
Andre looked at him.
So Leon told him. Not all of it—he would tell him the rest over many months, on many Tuesday nights, in a church basement on Druid Hill Avenue—but enough. The Sportsman’s Lounge. The afternoons. A little girl at the kitchen table next door listening for the sound of a car that parked crooked. The wall. The kitchen floor. A bus station on Fayette Street, and two tickets he had held in his own hands for the first time twelve days ago. A woman in a bathrobe on Ezekiel Booker’s doorstep at six o’clock in the morning.
When he was done, Andre was staring at the table.