He did not tell anyone at the branch how the visits went. He did not need to. He came back from them quieter. He stopped tapping the pen against his lip. And one afternoon in January, Tasha, passing his office on her way to the conference room that had become, informally, the fund's office, noticed that the glossy blue folders with the porch-swing couple on the front had disappeared from the drawer where he had kept them, and that he'd taken all the lollipops out of the jar at the welcome desk and replaced them with Starlight peppermints. Red and white. Not green.
She never asked him about it. But she told Odessa, and Odessa, at her kitchen table, laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down.
* * *
The first new roof went on in February, on the yellow house on Opelousas Street.
Odessa watched it from her kitchen window at five-fifteen in the morning, in the dark, when the roofing crew's truck pulled up with its headlights on and the men began unloading bundles of shingles onto the lawn by the light of a work lamp. By noon the old tarp was down, folded on the grass in a great faded blue square. By the next evening the roof was black and whole and new, and Alcide Broussard was standing in his front yard with his cane and his fedora, looking up at it, and he did not move for almost an hour.
That made ten. She counted again in the morning to be sure. Ten blue tarps from one kitchen window.
By the first of May, it was six. By the Fourth of July, three.
Not everything went right. Of the sixty-one households, nine still didn't qualify, even with the guarantee and the walkthroughs, because their debts were too heavy or their titles were tangled in heirs who had scattered to Houston and Dallas and Atlanta after the storms. Tasha, who had been given a title that took up two lines on her business card, spent her evenings learning what she could about succession law, and called Remy Sonnier in Lafayette so many times that he finally told her to just come down and sit in his office on Fridays. Two of the loans went bad by the end of the second year, and the fund paid its half, and Odessa signed the checks at her kitchen table without blinking, because that was what the money was for. A newspaper in Baton Rouge wrote a story about the program, and Lorraine Thibodeaux was quoted in it, and so was Tasha, and Odessa declined to be interviewed and asked that her name be left out, and the reporter left it out except for the name of the fund, which she couldn't do anything about.