PART 5 — FINAL
Okafor was right about the timing.
Months.
Glenn pleaded in the spring.
Wire fraud, the vendor scheme, and a count for the P.O. box that the prosecutor called “the part his girlfriend will be explaining separately.”
Trina did not plead.
Trina went to trial, and said she’d thought it was consulting, and a jury that had heard Ida Bradshaw describe a cookie for eleven minutes did not believe her.
Some things did not come back.
Twenty-two years.
That’s the one.
Not Glenn — Glenn was a man I’d known for twenty-four years and understood for about four of them.
Trina I’d understood.
Or I’d thought so.
She’d held my hand at my mother’s fun*ral.
She’d had a key.
I’ve stopped trying to find the day it turned, because Earl says there isn’t one — “they don’t turn, they were always the one with the key; you just didn’t need to check” — and I’ve decided he’s right.
The money didn’t come back either.
Six hundred and forty thousand is a restitution schedule, not a check, and Halloway Freight will be collecting from a man with no assets for a long time, and I’ve made my peace with the fact that the house I bought with my mother’s insurance is the only thing in that marriage that a court never had to touch, because a court never had a reason to.
“Only your name,” my mother had said.
“I’ve been married twice.
I know why.”
Ida is still in the guest room.
That surprised everyone, including Paulette, who said, in April, “Yvonne, you don’t have to — she’s Glenn’s mother — ”
“She’s Ida, Paulette.
She sat on my porch and told her son about the two times she unlocked the door.
Nobody in your family has ever said a truer thing.
She stays.”
Paulette comes on Sundays now.
She sits with her mother.
She said, in June, “I wired the tickets.
I brought him back.
I’ve been thinking about why.”
“And?”
“Because it was easier for me if he was here.
Then I didn’t have to think about him on a beach with no money.”
“That’s the whole answer,” I said.
“Everybody who does it.”
The bucket’s still on the porch.
Old brass.
Fourteen cylinders.
I decided, in the end, which kind of person I was, and it turned out to be neither — not the kind who keeps them, not the kind who throws them in the river.
I’m the kind who leaves them in a bucket by the door so that anyone coming up the walk can see what happened to the last set.
Earl comes on Thursdays.
He does not need to.
He checks the locks he installed, and drinks the coffee I make, and he has told me, twice, that he doesn’t usually “follow up,” and I have told him, twice, that I know.
In October he brought a key.
One.
On a ring with a small brass tag that said, in his handwriting, EARL — THURS.
“That’s for the shop,” he said.
“Not this house.
Nobody’s getting a key to this house but you.
But if you ever need a lock changed and I’m not answering, that opens the shop.
The drill’s on the left.”
I took it.
It’s the first key anyone’s given me since Saturday night.
I’ve been careful about who gets one.
He’s the only one who’s earned it, and he earned it by not asking.
Last week, Ida and I were at the kitchen table, and she looked at the clock — my mother’s, from the yard sale, 1988 — and she said, “Yvonne.
The clock.
It’s four minutes fast.”
“It’s always been four minutes fast.
Mama set it that way.
She said it was the only way she’d ever been early for anything.”
Ida considered this.
“She was married twice.”
“Yes.”
“And she bought you a house in your own name and set her clock four minutes fast.”
“Yes.”
“Then she knew,” Ida said.
“She knew what a woman needs.
A door that’s hers and a little more time than they think she has.”
I looked at the clock.
7:22.
Four minutes fast.
