“I still do. You don’t ever get all the way rid of it. You just stop feeding it. Every day, you stop feeding it.” He put his hand on the boy’s head. The hair needed cutting. “Your daddy’s learning how. It’s hard. Some days it’s the hardest thing in the world.”
Jayden thought about this for a long time, the way he thought about everything, frowning.
“I didn’t go in the house,” he said. “That day. I saw the truck and I didn’t go in. I ran all the way here. I didn’t even stop at the corner store.” He looked worried. “Was that right? Mom said I misunderstood.”
“You did exactly right,” Leon said. “You did exactly what you were told. You didn’t misunderstand anything that mattered.”
He stood up, his knees cracking again, and went to the drawer under his station and took out a small ring of keys. He worked one of them off. It was brass, newer than the other, with a square bow, cut at Haddad’s Hardware that morning. He threaded it onto a length of white string from the spool he kept for tying up towels, and knotted it, and held it out.
“This one opens the front door of this shop,” he said. “Any time. Day or night. You don’t need a reason and you don’t need to be scared to use it. You don’t even have to be running. You can just come.”