"You spoke when you saw what happened to me. You've spoken again since. We're responsible for what we do with the chance in front of us, Dorothy. That's enough to build something on."
Sandra opened the front door a moment later carrying a plate of warm cornbread. The scent reached Raymond before she crossed the porch, and he turned with an expression of innocent interest that fooled nobody. "You said you weren't hungry," she reminded him. "I wasn't hungry five minutes ago." Dorothy took a piece from the plate and declared it better than anything being served at the church breakfast, an opinion Sandra accepted without pretending modesty.
The three of them stood in the driveway as the neighborhood moved around them. A father two doors down struggled to start his lawn mower. Teenagers rolled by on bicycles, laughing at something none of the adults could hear. The mockingbirds resumed their daily argument in the live oak, and a small child somewhere around the bend tried once more to ride up the shallow slope without relying on the training wheels.
"Zeke asked whether the commission meeting is open to everybody," Sandra said. Zeke was a young neighbor who had helped organize a block association after the trial. "He wants to come with his father." Raymond nodded.
"Tell him the door's open. We need people who disagree with us as much as we need people who already approve of the work." Dorothy smiled. "You'll get plenty of disagreement. This is Garland."
For a while they talked about nothing related to police or courtrooms. Dorothy wanted to know whether Raymond planned to replace the Chevelle's aging weather stripping. Sandra wanted him to finish a repair on the back fence before the next heavy rain. Raymond suggested that both projects could be completed in one weekend if nobody interrupted him, and the two women laughed at an optimism they had heard before.
When Dorothy finally walked home, Sandra remained beside the car. She looked at the front bumper, its chrome reflecting a distorted version of the two of them standing together. "Do you ever wish you had shown the badge the moment he arrived?" she asked.
Raymond considered the question more honestly than he had months earlier. "Sometimes," he said. "Especially when I think about how close that baton came to being used. I wish the danger had never reached our door."
"And the rest of it?" Sandra asked. He looked toward Dorothy's house, then toward the place across the street where Marcus had stood with his phone.
"I don't wish the truth had stayed hidden," he answered. "I just wish it hadn't taken what happened to us to make people look at the complaints they already had." Sandra reached for his hand. "I know," she said, and they stood together until the sun climbed a little higher.