Three. Loretta’s watch goes back to Kiara, from whose wrist it was taken.
Four. Patrice receives the sum of one Sunday’s wage.
She’ll know the amount.
She set it.'”
Patrice stood up.
“This is — Daddy was confused, he was blind, he was on medication, that girl manipulated—”
“Mrs. Booker-Hale,” Mr. Abernathy said mildly, “your father dictated this to me in this office, in front of two witnesses, on a Tuesday, with a clean bill from his physician that morning.
He anticipated that sentence.
He asked me to tell you so.”
The cousins had stopped looking at their phones.
An uncle in the back row — Mr. Booker’s younger brother, Otis, eighty, in a suit older than I was — had put his hand flat on his knee the way a man does when he’s steadying himself, and he was looking at his niece with an expression I would have called grief if I hadn’t known better.
It was recognition.
“Patrice,” he said, in a voice like gravel, “sit down and let the man read.”
Patrice sat.
Mr. Abernathy turned the page.
“‘Five. And this is the one that matters.
Miss Carrington: find my granddaughter.
Kiara did not leave me.
She was told I’d said things I never said, and I was told she’d said things she never said, and the person who told both of us has been sitting in my kitchen for three years wearing her mother’s watch.
I couldn’t see it.
But I could hear it ticking.
Find her, and give her the tapes.'”
“Tapes?” I said.
It was the first word I’d spoken.
Mr. Abernathy reached under the desk and set a shoebox on it.
Inside, in rows, were cassette tapes — the small kind, the kind that go in a handheld recorder — and each one was labeled in the careful capitals of a man writing without sight, with a ruler under his hand.
SUNDAY 1.
SUNDAY 2.
SUNDAY 3.
Forty-four of them.
“He recorded every visit,” Mr. Abernathy said. “The recorder was in the pocket of the army jacket.
He said — I’m quoting again — ‘If Kiara ever comes back, she should hear what her grandfather sounded like when he thought he was talking to her.
And if she doesn’t, then the girl who did come should have them, because she earned every one.'”
I put my hand over my mouth.
Forty-four Sundays.
Every story about Loretta.
Every sulk about the tenth car.
