He put on his glasses.
“I’ll read it exactly as he dictated it, because he was very specific.
‘To the young woman my daughter paid to pretend to be my granddaughter — yes, Patrice, I knew.
I knew by her second Sunday.
I am blind, not deaf.'”
Patrice’s arms came uncrossed.
And what he read next left everyone in that room stunned.
PART 2
Mr. Abernathy turned the page.
He was a small, tidy man in his sixties who had, he’d tell me later, done Mr. Booker’s legal work for thirty years and had never once been asked to read anything aloud to a room.
“‘My granddaughter Kiara has a laugh like her grandmother.
This girl laughs like somebody who learned it from a tired mother.
I loved them both.
I would like the record to show I was not fooled for one minute past the first Sunday, and that I let it go on for eleven months because I wanted to see who my daughter had hired, and because — by the third week — I didn’t want her to stop coming.'”
