and about the night Rita came through in 2005 and took the carport, and the year after that, when he'd put the carport back himself at sixty-three years old.
"And then Laura," he said, and stopped.
"Show her," said Odessa.
He took them through the house. The front rooms were spotless, the way old people's houses are spotless, with doilies on the arms of the chairs and a big framed photograph of Ernestine over the television. Then he opened the door to the back hall and the smell came out to meet them: wet plaster and mildew and something sweetish underneath, like rot.
The back bedroom had no ceiling. Where the ceiling had been there were raw joists and the underside of the roof decking, black with water stain, and above that, through gaps where the shingles had gone, a pale blue light that Tasha realized after a moment was the tarp, glowing in the sun. The bed had been dragged against the far wall. The mattress was gone. On the box spring were cardboard boxes of photographs and clothes, covered in a shower curtain.
"This was our room," said Mr. Broussard. "Me and Ernestine. Forty-nine years."
Tasha stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.
"I sleep on the sofa now," he said. "It's all right. The sofa's comfortable. Ernestine picked it out." He tapped the floor with his cane, a soft, dead sound where the subfloor had gone spongy. "I asked the bank for a little money to fix it. They said no. Said my house wasn't worth enough." He looked at Tasha, not unkindly. "You work for them?"
"Yes, sir," Tasha whispered.
"Hm." He considered her. "Well. Somebody got to."
Out on the porch, after, Tasha sat with the cold bottle of Barq's sweating between her palms and didn't say anything for a long time. The sun was going down over the roofs, and the light came in sideways and gold through the fig leaves. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere a child was practicing trumpet, badly.
"It doesn't make sense," Tasha said finally. "I'm sorry, Mr. Broussard. It doesn't make sense. Twenty-four five against a house that was ninety-four. That's a — that's nothing. That's a loan we'd approve in our sleep on Ryan Street. I've seen us approve worse on Ryan Street. A man came in last month wanting forty thousand for a pool. A pool. Approved in two days."
"I know," said Odessa.
"Then how —" Tasha stopped. Then she said, very carefully, as if she were stepping from joist to joist across a floor that wasn't there yet: "Miss Dessa. When I was going through the Fontenot file, back in my third month. The appraisal on it was strange. It was a desktop appraisal, not a walkthrough. They'd valued it off comparables. And the comparables they used were all — they were all burned-out houses. Houses on the demolition list. Houses with no roofs at all. I thought it was a mistake. I flagged it. I put a note in the file." She looked down at the bottle. "And then I got told to stay in my lane."