He wanted to say: She will. Of course she will. Don't worry, sweetheart. He could feel the words in his mouth, easy and warm. He thought of Bea Okafor, whom he'd never met, and of the things Nora had told him on the beach about what Lila had been told and how. Dead meant his body stopped. It doesn't start again.
"I can't promise you nothing bad will ever happen," he said slowly. "Nobody can promise that. Your papa would've told you the same. He was always very exact."
Lila nodded. "He said 'approximately.'"
"He did. He said it all the time. It drove me nuts." He looked up at the circle of light on the ceiling. "But here's what I can tell you, exactly. Your mama is in a big building on high ground. She's not in the water. She knows more about how water moves than almost anybody in this whole county; that's her job. She is very, very careful. And she told you she'd come back, and your mama doesn't lie to you. Does she?"
"She did," Lila said. "Today. About you."
Tom was quiet.
"But then she said sorry," Lila said. "And she said true."
"Then I think you can believe her."
Lila clicked her flashlight off and on, off and on. "Uncle Tom?"
"Yeah."
"Did you do the thing? The sad grown-up thing? That makes you not okay for kids?"
He breathed in. He let it out. The rain hammered on the roof.
"I used to," he said. "For a long time. Since I was not very much older than your mama's babysitter. I did it so much that I wasn't okay for anybody. Not kids, not grown-ups, not even me. And on January fourth I stopped. And every day since, I've done the work to keep stopping. Yesterday was a hard day, and I almost did it, and I didn't. That's what the coin was for. The one in your tin. It means I kept stopping for nine months."
Lila slid out of bed. She went to the dresser and opened the blue tin and dug through the paper clips and sugar packets and the receipt cranes, and came back holding the coin, and sat down on the floor next to him, in the column of light.
"Do you need it back?" she asked. "For if it's hard?"
He looked at the coin on her small palm, and for a moment he couldn't speak.
"No," he said. "No, I think it does more good with you. You keep it in there with your papa's things. That way—" He stopped. "That way there's a little bit of me in there with him. If that's okay. I wasn't there before. I'd like to be in there now."