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.'”
The room was very quiet.
I had my hands in my lap and could not feel them.
“‘Now, my instructions.'”
Mr. Abernathy looked at me over the glasses.
“‘One. The house on Alder Street, and its contents, I leave jointly to my granddaughter Kiara Booker and to Miss Nia Carrington — one by bl*od, and one by Sundays.
Two. My savings, which are more than my daughter believes, having spent three years telling me there was nothing left, go to the medical trust described in Schedule B, for the benefit of Jaylen Carrington, whose sister told me about him every single Sunday without once asking me for a dime.
Three. Loretta’s watch goes back to Kiara, from whose wrist it was taken.
Four. Patrice receives the sum of one Sunday’s wage.
She’ll know the amount.
She set it.'”
Patrice stood up.
“This is — Daddy was confused, he was blind, he was on medication, that girl manipulated—”
“Mrs. Booker-Hale,” Mr. Abernathy said mildly, “your father dictated this to me in this office, in front of two witnesses, on a Tuesday, with a clean bill from his physician that morning.
He anticipated that sentence.
He asked me to tell you so.”
The cousins had stopped looking at their phones.
An uncle in the back row — Mr. Booker’s younger brother, Otis, eighty, in a suit older than I was — had put his hand flat on his knee the way a man does when he’s steadying himself, and he was looking at his niece with an expression I would have called grief if I hadn’t known better.
It was recognition.
“Patrice,” he said, in a voice like gravel, “sit down and let the man read.”
Patrice sat.
Mr. Abernathy turned the page.
“‘Five. And this is the one that matters.
Miss Carrington: find my granddaughter.
Kiara did not leave me.
She was told I’d said things I never said, and I was told she’d said things she never said, and the person who told both of us has been sitting in my kitchen for three years wearing her mother’s watch.
I couldn’t see it.
But I could hear it ticking.
Find her, and give her the tapes.'”
“Tapes?” I said.
It was the first word I’d spoken.
Mr. Abernathy reached under the desk and set a shoebox on it.
Inside, in rows, were cassette tapes — the small kind, the kind that go in a handheld recorder — and each one was labeled in the careful capitals of a man writing without sight, with a ruler under his hand.
SUNDAY 1.
SUNDAY 2.
SUNDAY 3.
Forty-four of them.
“He recorded every visit,” Mr. Abernathy said. “The recorder was in the pocket of the army jacket.
He said — I’m quoting again — ‘If Kiara ever comes back, she should hear what her grandfather sounded like when he thought he was talking to her.
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.”
The room stopped breathing.
Patrice sat down.
She sat down slowly, the way people do when the floor has become uncertain, and her hand went to the Cartier watch on her wrist and stayed there.
“Miss Carrington,” Mr. Abernathy said, gently, “you’re in shock, and that’s appropriate. I’ll give you the box and the paperwork and a week.
But I’d start with Sunday thirty-one.
And I’d find Kiara Booker before anyone else in this room does.”
