“Why would she…”
“Can we come inside?” she asked. “Please. I don’t want to do this on the porch.”
I looked at the girl in the blue cardigan. She was looking at the ground. Her hands were shaking.
And then it hit me where I’d seen her face.
Every morning for seventeen years, across the breakfast table.
The shape of the eyes. The little dent in the chin. The way her eyebrows went up in the middle when she was worried.
She had Michael’s face.
I stepped back from the door. I don’t think I said “come in.” I don’t think I said anything. I just stepped back, and they came in, and I sat down hard on the bottom step of the stairs because my legs wouldn’t hold me anymore.
The woman’s name was Teresa Hale.
She sat on the edge of my couch with her hands folded in her lap. Annie sat next to her, very close. Neither of them took their coats off.
Teresa put the watch box on the coffee table between us. She opened it.
The gold watch was there, with its cracked crystal.
And under it, folded tight, was a wad of money. Twenties and tens and fives, held together with a hair tie. And a piece of notebook paper.
“It’s eleven hundred and forty dollars,” Teresa said. “I counted it twice.”
Lily’s coffee can money. Her New York money. Two years of hems and zippers and prom dresses.
“And this,” Teresa said, and handed me the note.
It was in Lily’s handwriting. Her loopy, slanted handwriting, the kind she’d had since fifth grade.
Annie,
This was our dad’s watch. It was his dad’s before that. I think it should go to you now, because I got to have him for thirteen years and you never got to have him at all.
The money is for whatever you need. I know it’s not enough. I’m sorry it’s not more.
I’m sorry about a lot of things that aren’t even my fault.
You have a really pretty voice. Please don’t sing behind the curtain.
