What’s he going to do, Marcus?
He’s blind.”
A pause.
“Kiara? Kiara’s not a problem. I told her he said she was a l*ech like her mother.
I told him she said he was a burden.
They haven’t spoken in three years.
Neither one of them is going to check.
Old people and proud people, Marcus. Same thing.”
Then the click of a cabinet, and the tape ran out.
I sat at my mother’s table for a long time.
My mother, who had come in from her second shift and stood in the doorway for the last minute of the tape without my noticing, came and sat down across from me and put both her hands over mine.
“That woman,” she said, “hired you to be the alibi.”
“Yes.”
“And he knew.”
“He knew by the second Sunday, Mama.”
“And he kept you anyway.”
“He said he didn’t want me to stop coming.”
My mother, who does not cry, because she does not have the time, cried at her own kitchen table for a man she had never met.
“Then you find that girl,” she said. “You find her tomorrow.”
Kiara Booker was not hard to find.
She was twenty-five, a dental hygienist in the next county, and she had not changed her number, because — she told me later — some part of her had never stopped waiting for a call from Alder Street that never came.
I called from the porch.
I don’t know why.
It seemed like the right place.
“Hello?”
“Kiara Booker? My name is Nia. You don’t know me. I was — your grandfather’s daughter paid me, for eleven months, to sit on his porch every Sunday and pretend to be you.”
Silence.
“He passed three weeks ago. I’m so sorry. I know you—”
“I know he passed,” she said, and her voice was flat and terrible. “I read it in the paper. Nobody called me. I stood at the back of the fun*ral and left before the end. Why are you calling me?”
“Because he knew I wasn’t you.
And he recorded every Sunday.
And there’s a tape he wanted you to hear, and it’s about what your aunt told you three years ago, and it isn’t true, Kiara.
None of it was true.
He never said you were a l*ech.
He asked for you every single week.”
There was no sound on the line for so long I thought she’d hung up.
