At one o’clock, I sat in the corner booth of the diner down the street, staring into a two-dollar cup of lukewarm diner coffee. Clara, my mother, watched me from across the laminated table.
“You are pulling at your hair again,” Clara said, setting her fork down on her paper napkin.
I lowered my hand from the silver hair clip behind my ear. “A name came across my desk this morning.”
Clara smoothed her lap with both palms, her face softening. “In Oakridge, names always circle back around. Who is it?”
“Mark Hilliard,” I said.
Clara went quiet, her fingers pressing into the fabric of her trousers. “He still lives in the county, then.”
“He wants fifty thousand dollars from my bank,” I said. “He wants me to approve a loan he cannot possibly collateralize.”
“People change, Diane,” she said. “The boy you knew twenty years ago is not the man who needs help today. He has a family now.”
“He did not look like a boy when he poured that bottle of industrial wood glue into my hair,” I said.
Clara looked down at her plate, her warm face tightening. “We do not know his circumstances, Diane. We only know what he did back then.”
“I am going to find out what he wants,” I said.
“Be careful,” Clara said, using her old schoolteacher voice. “Grudges have a way of souring the person who holds them.”
I returned to my office at four o’clock, locking the glass door behind me. The gray folder sat in the center of my desk, beneath the bronze paperweight.
I opened the folder to the medical disclosure section. On the third page, a document from St. Jude Memorial Hospital was clipped to the financial statements.
The child’s name was Lily Hilliard, age six. The scheduled procedure was a pediatric cardiac reconstruction.
The date of the surgery was October twelfth.
