“Thank you for your service,” she said, in a voice that made the words mean something else, and handed me a final envelope.
“We won’t be needing you anymore.”
On her wrist was the Cartier watch he’d told me about — the one he’d bought his wife the year they married, saved up over eleven months of a private’s pay, “so she’d have something that ticked as steady as I did.”
I looked at it.
She saw me look.
“Family piece,” she said, and turned away.
A week after the fun*ral, a lawyer called and asked me to come to his office.
The call caught me completely off guard.
When I arrived, several relatives were already there.
Patrice sat in the front, arms crossed.
The room felt tense.
The lawyer, Mr. Abernathy, opened a folder, looked directly at me, and said:
“Before he passed, he left one final instruction about you.”
He put on his glasses.
“I’ll read it exactly as he dictated it, because he was very specific.
‘To the young woman my daughter paid to pretend to be my granddaughter — yes, Patrice, I knew.
I knew by her second Sunday.
I am blind, not deaf.'”
Patrice’s arms came uncrossed.
And what he read next left everyone in that room stunned.
PART 2
Mr. Abernathy turned the page.
He was a small, tidy man in his sixties who had, he’d tell me later, done Mr. Booker’s legal work for thirty years and had never once been asked to read anything aloud to a room.
“‘My granddaughter Kiara has a laugh like her grandmother.
This girl laughs like somebody who learned it from a tired mother.
I loved them both.
I would like the record to show I was not fooled for one minute past the first Sunday, and that I let it go on for eleven months because I wanted to see who my daughter had hired, and because — by the third week — I didn’t want her to stop coming.'”
The room was very quiet.
I had my hands in my lap and could not feel them.
“‘Now, my instructions.'”
Mr. Abernathy looked at me over the glasses.
“‘One. The house on Alder Street, and its contents, I leave jointly to my granddaughter Kiara Booker and to Miss Nia Carrington — one by bl*od, and one by Sundays.
Two. My savings, which are more than my daughter believes, having spent three years telling me there was nothing left, go to the medical trust described in Schedule B, for the benefit of Jaylen Carrington, whose sister told me about him every single Sunday without once asking me for a dime.
