She held it out, and Kiara did not take it — I did, because Kiara’s hands had gone to her face — and I fastened it on Kiara’s wrist myself, in her grandfather’s kitchen, in front of the boxes and the bag of letters and the window full of neighbors.
“There,” I said. “It’s back where he could hear it.”
Lorna Pike read Patrice her situation in the flat voice of a woman who has done it forty times.
The power of attorney, the account, Marcus, the letters.
Patrice did not argue.
She looked, at the end, at the porch through the window — at the chair, and the green blanket, and the army jacket on its hook — and I watched her understand that the one person who might have forgiven her had already done it, on tape, on a Tuesday, in a lawyer’s office, and that the forgiveness had come with a condition she’d failed by opening a garbage bag.
“One Sunday’s wage,” she said, to nobody. “He left me one Sunday’s wage.”
“Four hundred dollars,” said Mr. Abernathy. “You set the amount.”
PART 5 — FINAL HIS
The house on Alder Street belongs to two granddaughters now.
One by bl*od, one by Sundays.
We didn’t sell it.
Everyone assumed we would — two young women, one with student loans and one with a lease across the county — and Mr. Abernathy laid out the numbers gently, the way he does everything.
Kiara and I listened.
Then Kiara said, “Where would he sit?”
And that was the whole discussion.
She moved into the back bedroom.
I kept my mother’s house — Jaylen’s treatments are covered now, by a trust a blind man built out of savings his daughter swore didn’t exist — and on Sundays, every Sunday, I drive to Alder Street at two o’clock and sit on the porch.
Sometimes Kiara’s there.
Sometimes she’s at work and it’s just me and the chair and the green blanket and the street.
I don’t pretend to be anybody anymore.
I’m Nia.
I sit where I sat.
And I listen to the cars, and I’m right about the make about six times out of ten, and I’m working on it.
Jaylen comes sometimes.
He’s fourteen, and stronger than he was — the trust pays for the specialist my mother had been told we couldn’t afford, and the specialist, it turns out, was the difference — and he sits on the top step in the spot Kiara sat with the shoebox and asks me to tell him Mr. Booker stories.
