Odessa shook it. Then she reached into her purse, and took out the manila envelope, and took out the deposit slip — the same one, square and blue — and slid it across the conference table. Not to Lorraine. To Tasha.
"Would you do the honors, baby?"
Tasha looked at the slip. She looked at the memo line. For the ones you turned down. Her eyes filled, and she blinked hard, twice, the way she had blinked on the bus when the bigger kids teased her for reading.
"Yes, ma'am," she said.
Alcide Broussard, who had heard the whole story of Tuesday twice in the car on the way over, put his fedora back on, indoors, which Ernestine would never have allowed.
"Well," he said. "That's quite generous."
And the whole table, even Grant Whitfield, laughed.
* * *
The first walkthrough was the yellow house on Opelousas Street, on a Monday in November, at eight in the morning, because Mr. Broussard said that was when the light came through the tarp best and he wanted them to see it.
Grant Whitfield parked his Tahoe on the street and sat in it for a minute with the engine running. Then he turned it off and got out. Tasha was already on the porch with the appraiser, a heavy, cheerful woman named Bernadette Ledoux from Sulphur who carried a laser measure in a holster on her belt like a pistol. Odessa was not there. She had said she would not be at any of them. It's not my house, she'd said. And it's not a show.
Mr. Broussard met him at the door in the pheasant tie.
"Mr. Whitfield."
"Mr. Broussard. Thank you for having me."
"Hm," said the old man, and stepped aside to let him in.
Grant had been in a great many houses in his life. He had been in his clients' houses on Lake Street and in River Oaks in Houston, where his wife's sister lived. He had been to Christmas parties in houses with two staircases. He had never, he realized, standing in the front room with the doilies on the arms of the chairs and the photograph of Ernestine over the television, been inside a house north of the interstate. Not once. Six years. He had grown up off Country Club Road. He had played football against Washington-Marion in high school. He had never been inside.
Mr. Broussard took him to the back bedroom.
Grant stood in the doorway for a long time. He looked up at the joists and the black water-stained decking and the pale blue glow of the tarp. He looked at the box spring with the shower curtain over it. He smelled the smell. Behind him, Bernadette's laser measure beeped as she shot the dimensions of the room, and Tasha wrote numbers on a clipboard, and neither of them said anything to him at all.
"Forty-nine years," said Mr. Broussard beside him. "Me and Ernestine."
"Yes, sir," Grant said. His voice did not sound like his own. "Ms. Moreau told me."