The summer, meanwhile, went on. School ended. The Falcons played their season, won some games, lost others, learned to bunt and to back up throws and to cheer for a teammate who struck out, which is a harder lesson than cheering for a teammate who hits a home run. Jordan played shortstop with growing steadiness, and Desmond, coaching from the third-base box, watched his son grow into the game the way he had watched him grow into everything else, gradually and then all at once. Nia, who had taken to keeping score at games in a small notebook of her own, learned the symbols for hits and errors and sacrifices, and she kept her scorebook as neatly as her mother kept the library shelves, and Desmond, seeing her with her pencil and her book, thought about logbooks again, about how a habit of writing things down true passes from one generation to the next without anyone making a speech about it. It just happens, when children watch adults keep records honestly, and when adults let children see the records. Tanya, at the library, organized a summer reading display on Montgomery history, and she put a book about civic life on the display, and she did not tell Desmond she had done it because of Saturday, but Desmond knew, and he was proud of her for it, in the quiet way a husband is proud when his wife does a good thing without announcing it. Hattie Adeyemi, across from the park, watched the season from her porch, and waved when the team walked past, and brought lemonade to practice once, in a large jug, because at seventy-one she had decided that bringing lemonade was a better use of a hot afternoon than sitting inside. The neighborhood, in other words, went on being a neighborhood, which is the most stubborn form of hope there is.
Desmond had not always been a man who kept a logbook. He had learned it, the way most useful habits are learned, from watching someone else do it well and from failing, once, to do it himself. When he was a young teacher, in his second year, he had lost track of a student's grades, a boy who had turned in work late and had improved steadily and whose average, Desmond discovered too late, had been calculated from an incomplete set of entries. The boy had not complained. He had just accepted the lower grade, quietly, and Desmond, seeing the quiet acceptance, had felt ashamed in a way that stayed with him. He had gone back through his papers, found the missing assignments, corrected the grade, and apologized to the boy in person, after school, in an empty classroom, and the boy had nodded and said it was all right, and Desmond had gone home and bought a thick notebook, and had begun the habit that would define his teaching ever after. Every assignment, every date, every note about a student, written down on the day, in ink, with no erasures, only corrections noted and dated. His grade book became a record he could stand behind, and his students, over the years, learned that Mr. Hayes's grades were fair not because he was kind, although he was kind, but because he was accurate, and accuracy, Desmond believed, was a form of kindness, because it meant a child would not be judged on a missing paper or a forgotten day. When he started coaching, he brought the same habit to the field. The Falcons logbook, with its worn cover, held every practice and game, every lineup, every note about a boy who was struggling at school or at home, every reminder to call a parent about cleats or about a ride. He kept it in his bag, and he consulted it before practice, and he wrote in it after practice, sitting on a bench while the boys drank water and the sun went down. Other coaches teased him about it, gently, calling him the professor, and Desmond laughed, because a nickname given in affection is a gift, and because he knew the book was not about him. It was about the boys, and about remembering them correctly.
Tanya had her own version of the habit. At the library, she kept records of programs and attendance and books requested and books found, not because anyone required her to keep them in such detail, but because a library, she believed, was a record of a neighborhood's curiosity, and curiosity deserved to be counted. She kept the family's records the same way, in folders labeled by year, with tax papers and school papers and medical papers in order, so that when a question arose, the answer could be found without panic. When Desmond had been arrested, Tanya had not panicked about paper, because she had spent twenty years making sure paper could be found. She had found the permit in minutes. She had found the sign-up sheets in minutes. She had made a new folder in an evening. That steadiness, Desmond thought, was not a small thing. It was the reason the family had been able to answer a rewritten report with a folder of their own, and the reason Yolanda had been able to build a case without starting from nothing. A family that keeps its papers, he thought, is a family that can tell its own story, and a family that can tell its own story is harder to silence with someone else's version. He told Tanya that one night, sitting on the porch after the children were asleep, and Tanya, who did not like compliments that sounded like speeches, said, "I just like things in order," and Desmond said, "Order is how we got home," and they sat for a while without talking, listening to the crickets and the distant sounds of the neighborhood settling for the night.