PART 3
I listened to Sunday thirty-one that night, at my mother’s kitchen table, on a cassette player I bought at a pawnshop on the way home because nobody I know owns one.
The first hour was us.
Me and Mr. Booker on the porch, the street, his voice — “That you, baby girl?” — and mine, and I had to stop the tape twice and put my head down on the table, because a week is not long enough to be ready for a de*d man to say your name.
Then the porch went quiet.
The jacket, I understood, had been left on a kitchen chair.
A door.
Patrice’s voice, close to the recorder, sharp, on the phone.
“—no, she doesn’t suspect, why would she, he thinks it’s Kiara. Yes. Four hundred a week is nothing compared to what’s in that account, Marcus, and as long as he’s got a girl calling him Grandpa every Sunday, nobody from the VA is going to ask why his real family doesn’t visit.
The social worker came twice.
Both times a Sunday.
Both times there’s a granddaughter on the porch.
Case closed.
Exactly.
He signed the power of attorney in March. He can’t read what he’s signing, he just asks if it’s for the house. I say yes.
What’s he going to do, Marcus?
He’s blind.”
A pause.
“Kiara? Kiara’s not a problem. I told her he said she was a l*ech like her mother.
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.
“Then you find that girl,” she said. “You find her tomorrow.”
Kiara Booker was not hard to find.
She was twenty-five, a dental hygienist in the next county, and she had not changed her number, because — she told me later — some part of her had never stopped waiting for a call from Alder Street that never came.
I called from the porch.
I don’t know why.
It seemed like the right place.
“Hello?”
“Kiara Booker? My name is Nia. You don’t know me. I was — your grandfather’s daughter paid me, for eleven months, to sit on his porch every Sunday and pretend to be you.”
Silence.
“He passed three weeks ago. I’m so sorry. I know you—”
“I know he passed,” she said, and her voice was flat and terrible. “I read it in the paper. Nobody called me. I stood at the back of the fun*ral and left before the end. Why are you calling me?”
“Because he knew I wasn’t you.
And he recorded every Sunday.
And there’s a tape he wanted you to hear, and it’s about what your aunt told you three years ago, and it isn’t true, Kiara.
None of it was true.
He never said you were a l*ech.
He asked for you every single week.”
There was no sound on the line for so long I thought she’d hung up.
Then a sound I recognized.
The sound a person makes when a three-year weight comes off in one motion.
“Where are you?”
“His porch.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” said Kiara Booker. “Don’t move.”
She got there in thirty-two.
She came up the badly built ramp in her work scrubs with her car keys still in her hand, and she stopped at the top, and looked at the chair, and the green blanket I’d left folded on it, and the army jacket on the hook by the door.
Then she looked at me.
I was sitting exactly where I’d sat for forty-four Sundays.
“You’re the one,” she said. “Aunt Patrice told me at the fun*ral. ‘Some girl we hired, don’t make a scene.’ I thought you were—” She stopped. “I thought you took him from me.”
“I thought I was st*aling something too,” I said. “Turns out we were both r*bbed by the same person.”
I held out the shoebox.
Forty-four tapes.
“He said give these to you. He said you should hear what he sounded like when he thought he was talking to you.”
Kiara sat down on the top step of her grandfather’s porch in her scrubs and took the box in both hands and did not open it.
“I don’t think I can,” she said.
“Then don’t yet.”
We sat for a while.
A car went by — a pickup, diesel, something old — and Kiara said, without looking, “Ford,” and then stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.
“He taught you that,” I said.
“On this step. When I was nine. I used to think it was a trick.” She was crying without making any sound. “He never once got the Fords wrong.”
“He got a Chevy wrong the third Sunday I was here. Sulked for an hour.”
Kiara laughed, wet and surprised.
“He’d never have admitted that to me.”
“He didn’t admit it to me either. He said the Chevy was ‘running a Ford engine, probably.'”
“That’s — yes. That’s exactly what he’d say.”
“But there’s one I think you need to hear before anything else. Sunday thirty-one. It’s your aunt on the phone.”
She looked up.
“And then there’s a lawyer who needs to talk to both of us, because your grandfather left this house to the two of us together.”
“Together?”
“‘One by bl*od,'” I said, “‘and one by Sundays.'”
Kiara Booker laughed.
She laughed with her whole chest, on a porch, holding a shoebox, with her face wet — and I understood, in that second, exactly what Mr. Booker had meant.
It was Loretta’s laugh.
