And she thought about Mike Callahan sitting in booth nine saying things at a frequency she was still processing. She picked up her phone. She texted her nephew Arrest came through. Your cousin's eggs were better than the news.
He replied in 40 seconds with a single laughing emoji and then, "Tell me when he comes back for that patty melt." Leo Danton heard about the arrest from Deja who had seen it on her phone while Leo was sitting on the living room floor with Rosie in his lap, his back against the couch. One of her small fists wrapped entirely around his index finger. Rosie was looking at him with the unguarded total concentration that very young children bring to new faces cataloging him, memorizing him, deciding about him with the pure animal honesty that humans only have before they learn to be careful.
Deja came in from the kitchen. She stood in the doorway. "Velasquez got arrested," she said. Leo looked up from his daughter's face.
He processed it, the name, the fact, the weight of it. Then he looked back at Rosie. "Okay," he said. Deja watched him for a moment.
"That's it. Okay. What else is there?" he said.
He wasn't being dismissive. He wasn't being small about it. He said it the same way Mike Callahan said things, not because it didn't matter, but because the thing that mattered more was right there in his lap looking up at him with his own eyes deciding whether to trust him. Deja leaned against the door frame.
She looked at them, the two of them, her daughter, and this man who had spent a night in the Mojave Desert and come out of it different in a way she couldn't fully quantify yet, but could clearly see. She thought about what Leo had told her about booth nine, about the patches, about a man who picked up a coffee cup with a gun in his face and spoke at a frequency that reorganized rooms. She thought about the footage she'd watched three times on her phone with her hand over her mouth. She thought about what it meant that this was the night that finally changed something.