Then Grant took a peppermint from the drawer — a red-and-white one — and held it out to the boy, and then, after a moment, took out a second one and held it out to Odessa.
She looked at it.
"Well," she said, and took it. "That's quite generous."
He laughed. It was a real laugh, startled out of him, and it made the teller up front turn around.
* * *
On the drive home, Jaylen fell asleep in the booster seat with his new passbook clutched against his chest and a peppermint stuck to his cheek. Odessa drove the long way, the old route, Bus 114, the north loop. Her hands knew it. She let them.
There was the corner where the Broussard boys had waited, three in a row. The yellow house sat on it with a black roof, whole, and on the porch in the metal glider an old man in a fedora was asleep in the late sun with the radio on.
There was the corner where Precious Guillory had stood in her pink raincoat. There was Pine Street, and a new roof. There was the Simiens' carport with new metal on it and the truck parked underneath out of the weather. There was Lombardy Street, and Lillian Moreau's house, and the back half of it was finished now, new decking and new shingles and new gutters, and the sound of the tarp breathing in the wind was gone, and Tasha said that the first week it was gone neither she nor her grandmother could sleep for the quiet.
Odessa turned onto Opelousas Street and parked in front of her own house and sat for a while, with the engine off and the boy asleep behind her, looking up at the roofs.
There was one blue tarp left that she could see from here. It was on the old barbershop, the one with the plywood on the windows and the faded pink sign. Henry's grandson had finally come back from Dallas in August and settled the title. The application was on Tasha's desk. The walkthrough was Thursday.
"One," Odessa said aloud.
She thought about Lucien in the bow of the flatboat, pointing at open water. That used to be land. That used to be land. She thought about the man in the robin's-egg polo saying generous. She thought about the green lollipop. She thought, for some reason, about the nun at Sacred Heart and her ruler, and about square, upright letters, and how a number written clearly was a kind of promise.
"You never know," she said to the empty seat beside her.
Then she got out and went around to the back door to wake the boy, because it was getting late, and his great-grandfather would be wanting to see the passbook, and she had never in twenty-nine years been late dropping a child at his stop.