PART 4
The VA fr*ud investigator was a tired woman named Lorna Pike who had, she said, “seen this exact thing forty times and never once with a tape.”
She listened to Sunday thirty-one in Mr. Abernathy’s office with her hands folded and her face doing nothing, and at the end she said, “Marcus. Who’s Marcus?”
Marcus was Patrice’s boyfriend, a man who “handled her finances,” and who had, it turned out, handled them straight into a joint account with Patrice’s name and Mr. Booker’s power of attorney and forty-one thousand dollars of a blind veteran’s savings over three years.
“He signed for the house,” Lorna Pike said. “She told him it was for the house. He couldn’t read it.”
“He couldn’t read it,” Mr. Abernathy agreed, “which is why he came to me in April and had me pull every document filed under his name in the county, and had me read every one of them to him, out loud, twice.
He knew about the power of attorney before I did.
He asked me not to act on it.”
“Why?”
“He said, ‘Because if I stop it now, Patrice will stop the girl from coming, and I’m not done knowing her yet.'”
I had to leave the room.
The confrontation, when it came, happened at the house.
Patrice had a key.
Patrice had, in fact, been at the house every day since the reading, “sorting things,” which Mr. Abernathy had permitted for one week because the estate hadn’t closed, and which he had allowed to continue for a second week for a reason he didn’t explain to me until later.
He wanted her there when we arrived.
So on a Saturday morning in April, Kiara and I drove to Alder Street together, in her car, with the shoebox on the back seat like a passenger, and Mr. Abernathy behind us in his, and Lorna Pike behind him in a county vehicle, and the whole street — because it is that kind of street — was on its porches by the time we parked.
Mr. Delgado across the way.
The Simmons twins with their coffee.
Miss Ruby from the corner, who had brought Mr. Booker a plate every Wednesday for two years and had, she told me later, “wondered about that daughter since the first week, but it wasn’t my place.”
It was everybody’s place now.
That’s what a street decides when three cars pull up in a row.
Kiara sat in the driver’s seat with the engine off for a full minute.
“I haven’t been inside since the fight,” she said. “Three years. I don’t even know if my key works.”
“Mine does,” I said. “Patrice gave it to me. For Sundays.”
Kiara looked at the key in my hand for a long moment.
“She gave you a key to my grandfather’s house,” she said, “so you could be me.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re giving it to me so I can be me.”
“Yes.”
She took it.
Patrice was in the kitchen.
She had boxes.
She had a garbage bag, and in it, when Lorna Pike asked her to set it down, were three years of letters from Kiara Booker to her grandfather, unopened, addressed in a hand that started grown-up and, over thirty-one envelopes, got slowly angry, and then stopped.
Kiara looked at the bag.
She did not say anything.
She did not have to.
The bag said everything the tape hadn’t.
“You kept them,” Kiara said finally. “You didn’t even throw them away. You just — kept them from him.”
“He couldn’t read them, Kiara, what was I supposed to—”
“You could have read them to him.”
The kitchen went absolutely still.
Through the window, the Alder Street porches were still too.
And into that stillness, Patrice Booker-Hale — who had not said one true thing in this story yet — said her first.
“He’d have chosen you.”
“What?”
“Over me. He always did. You were Loretta’s laugh and I was the one who stayed and did the work, and he’d have given you everything, and I—” She stopped. “I just wanted, one time, to be the one in the room.”
“You were the one in the room, Aunt Patrice,” Kiara said quietly. “For three years. You were the only one. You had him all to yourself, and you spent it robbing him.”
Lorna Pike stepped forward.
“Mrs. Booker-Hale, I’m going to need the watch.”
Patrice looked down at the Cartier on her wrist.
The watch a private had saved eleven months for.
The one that ticked as steady as he did.
“It’s a family—”
“It’s in the will,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Item three. ‘To Kiara, from whose wrist it was taken.'”
Patrice unclasped it.
Her hands were not steady.
She held it out, and Kiara did not take it — I did, because Kiara’s hands had gone to her face — and I fastened it on Kiara’s wrist myself, in her grandfather’s kitchen, in front of the boxes and the bag of letters and the window full of neighbors.
“There,” I said. “It’s back where he could hear it.”
Lorna Pike read Patrice her situation in the flat voice of a woman who has done it forty times.
The power of attorney, the account, Marcus, the letters.
Patrice did not argue.
She looked, at the end, at the porch through the window — at the chair, and the green blanket, and the army jacket on its hook — and I watched her understand that the one person who might have forgiven her had already done it, on tape, on a Tuesday, in a lawyer’s office, and that the forgiveness had come with a condition she’d failed by opening a garbage bag.
“One Sunday’s wage,” she said, to nobody. “He left me one Sunday’s wage.”
“Four hundred dollars,” said Mr. Abernathy. “You set the amount.”
PART 5 — FINAL
The house on Alder Street belongs to two granddaughters now.
One by bl*od, one by Sundays.
We didn’t sell it.
Everyone assumed we would — two young women, one with student loans and one with a lease across the county — and Mr. Abernathy laid out the numbers gently, the way he does everything.
Kiara and I listened.
Then Kiara said, “Where would he sit?”
And that was the whole discussion.
She moved into the back bedroom.
I kept my mother’s house — Jaylen’s treatments are covered now, by a trust a blind man built out of savings his daughter swore didn’t exist — and on Sundays, every Sunday, I drive to Alder Street at two o’clock and sit on the porch.
Sometimes Kiara’s there.
Sometimes she’s at work and it’s just me and the chair and the green blanket and the street.
I don’t pretend to be anybody anymore.
I’m Nia.
I sit where I sat.
And I listen to the cars, and I’m right about the make about six times out of ten, and I’m working on it.
Jaylen comes sometimes.
He’s fourteen, and stronger than he was — the trust pays for the specialist my mother had been told we couldn’t afford, and the specialist, it turns out, was the difference — and he sits on the top step in the spot Kiara sat with the shoebox and asks me to tell him Mr. Booker stories.
“Tell me the one about the tenth car.”
“You’ve heard the one about the tenth car.”
“Tell me again. Do the sulk.”
I do the sulk.
My mother came once, in June, on her one Sunday off, and stood on the porch for a long time looking at the chair and the green blanket, and then she sat down in the chair — the only person besides Kiara and me who ever has — and folded her hands on the blanket and listened to the street.
“He asked about Jaylen every week?” she said.
“Every week.”
“And he didn’t have to.”
“He didn’t have to, Mama.”
She was quiet for a while.
“I’d have liked to tell him thank you,” she said. “In person.”
“He heard you,” I said. “He heard everything. It’s on the plaque.”
