She told him. Andre had been sober nine years, and then his brother died, and in August Tasha had started finding things. A smell on him he blamed on a coworker. A mini bottle of something in the console of the truck, the kind they sell at the register of the liquor store on North Avenue, which he said had to be his brother’s, left over, and she had wanted to believe him so badly that she had. Missed calls. A dent in the truck’s fender that he couldn’t explain. Weekends where he was there and not there.
“And then last Wednesday,” she said, and her voice did something, and she waited for it to stop doing it. “Last Wednesday he was supposed to pick Jayden up from school. It was his day. I had a deposition that ran long downtown, and he was supposed to get him. And Jayden sat on the front steps of that school for an hour and ten minutes, Daddy. An hour and ten minutes. In the cold. Telling Mr. Okafor that his dad was coming, his dad was definitely coming, his dad was just stuck in traffic. Mr. Okafor finally called me. I left in the middle of a deposition. I picked Jayden up, and I took him home, and the truck was in the driveway, and Andre was asleep in it. In the driver’s seat. With the engine off, thank God, the engine was off, and there was a bottle on the floor on the passenger side.” She closed her eyes. “Jayden saw. I tried to get him in the house before he saw, and he saw.”
Leon’s knuckles had gone pale on the edge of the sink. He was aware of a sound in his ears, a high faint whine like a clipper motor running with no hair to cut, and he knew that sound. He had not heard it in a very long time. It was the sound that used to come right before he stopped being himself.
“Where is he,” he said. “This place. Glen Arden. Where is it.”
“Daddy.”
“I asked you where it is.”
“And I’m not going to tell you. Not today.” She came and stood beside him. She put one of her hands over one of his on the sink, and her hand was cold from outside. “You want to know why he has the key? Let me tell you why he has the key, and then you decide whether you still want to drive up there.”