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.
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.”
