Esau Pettiford came to see the house on the first Sunday in April. His daughter Joan drove him from Greensboro. Marquis came, too, in a pressed shirt. I'd invited them through Legal Aid, properly, with everybody's lawyers knowing, because I didn't want anybody, ever, to be able to say I'd done anything about that house in the dark.
He was eighty-five, small and very straight, in a gray suit and a hat with a feather in the band, and he walked with a cane he didn't seem to need. He stood at the end of the front walk for a long time and looked at the house. He didn't say anything about the gray vinyl floors or the bubble-glass light fixture, though he saw them through the windows. He looked at the porch.
"Leatha painted that," he said, looking up at the ceiling. "Haint blue. Nineteen eighty-nine. Said the house wasn't finished until it had a blue ceiling." He shook his head. "They left it."
"They did," I said. "I think it's why I bought it."
He came up the steps slowly, and looked at the swing, and at my father, who was in it, and who looked back at him with an expression I hadn't seen on his face in a long time, a kind of sharp, delighted recognition, not of the man but of the type.
"You carry mail?" my father said.
Esau Pettiford looked at him. "Laid brick. Thirty-nine years."
"Hm. I carried mail. Thirty-eight." My father slid over on the swing. "Sit down. You look like a man who's been standing up too long."
Esau sat down beside him on his own porch, under his wife's blue ceiling, and the swing creaked under the two of them, and they started arguing about the Braves almost immediately.