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.
