Every time he’d said, “Loretta would’ve liked you,” to a girl he knew, the whole time, was not his granddaughter — and had said it anyway, into a recorder, so that someday one of two young women would know he’d meant it.
Across the room, a cousin I didn’t know started to cry.
Patrice did not.
Patrice was looking at the shoebox the way you look at a witness you didn’t know had survived.
“He recorded—” she said. “In the house. Every Sunday. Everything.”
“Everything he said,” Mr. Abernathy agreed. “And, in the instance of Sunday thirty-one, I’m told, a good deal of what was said to him in the kitchen afterward, when he’d left the jacket on the chair.”
The room stopped breathing.
Patrice sat down.
She sat down slowly, the way people do when the floor has become uncertain, and her hand went to the Cartier watch on her wrist and stayed there.
“Miss Carrington,” Mr. Abernathy said, gently, “you’re in shock, and that’s appropriate. I’ll give you the box and the paperwork and a week.
But I’d start with Sunday thirty-one.
And I’d find Kiara Booker before anyone else in this room does.”
PART 3
I listened to Sunday thirty-one that night, at my mother’s kitchen table, on a cassette player I bought at a pawnshop on the way home because nobody I know owns one.
The first hour was us.
Me and Mr. Booker on the porch, the street, his voice — “That you, baby girl?” — and mine, and I had to stop the tape twice and put my head down on the table, because a week is not long enough to be ready for a de*d man to say your name.
Then the porch went quiet.
The jacket, I understood, had been left on a kitchen chair.
A door.
Patrice’s voice, close to the recorder, sharp, on the phone.
“—no, she doesn’t suspect, why would she, he thinks it’s Kiara. Yes. Four hundred a week is nothing compared to what’s in that account, Marcus, and as long as he’s got a girl calling him Grandpa every Sunday, nobody from the VA is going to ask why his real family doesn’t visit.
The social worker came twice.
Both times a Sunday.
Both times there’s a granddaughter on the porch.
Case closed.
Exactly.
He signed the power of attorney in March. He can’t read what he’s signing, he just asks if it’s for the house. I say yes.
