“She’s bringing Harry,” Piper added. She stared at me, her eyes narrowing with the practical suspicion she had carried since she was a little girl. “Who is Harry, Dad?”
“Her husband,” I said. “She married him twelve years ago.”
“And she thinks three hundred dollars buys her a seat next to you?” Piper asked.
“I’ll call Sandra back,” I said, though I knew the venue had already taken the money.
“Don’t let her run this, Dad,” Piper said. “She doesn’t get to buy her way back into the front row.”
She picked up the scissors again, but her fingers were tight against the plastic loops.
The heat of the afternoon lingered on the front porch by five o’clock. Jerome sat on the top step, holding a sweating glass of lemonade, his broad shoulders leaning against the wooden railing.
“Adele is worried about the photographer,” Jerome said. He placed a steadying hand on my shoulder as I sat down beside him on the warm wood. “She wants to know if there’s any way Maya can claim the rights to the pictures afterward.”
“If she paid for part of the package, or if she claims she’s family,” Jerome said. His short, reassuring sentences usually calmed me, but now they felt like a warning of things to come. “We just want to make sure the contract is in your name only.”
“I paid the deposit in June,” I said. “Six hundred dollars.”
“Good,” Jerome said. “Let’s keep it that way. We don’t need any surprises on the bill.”
“She has money now, Jerome,” I said. “Her husband is in commercial real estate.”
“We have enough,” Jerome said. He looked down at his boots, then back at the quiet Ohio street. “We don’t need theirs.”
“She’s going to try to turn this into her own show,” I said.
“She can try,” Jerome said. “But Adele knows who stood by her.”
A car rumbled past, its tires kicking up loose gravel from the shoulder of the road. I wondered how many people in town already knew she was coming back.
The house was quiet by nine at night. The girls were in their rooms, and the refrigerator in the kitchen gave its familiar, rattling sigh as the compressor kicked off.
I walked down the narrow hallway toward my bedroom. The floorboards creaked under my slippers, the same spots that had warned me when the girls were trying to sneak downstairs for late-night snacks.
I stopped in front of the hallway closet. The brass knob was dark, catching only the faint light from the streetlamp outside the window.
Behind that door, on the top shelf under the heavy wool blankets, sat the white cardboard box. I had not looked inside it since the year Lucille turned five.
My hand reached out, my fingers hovering an inch from the cold brass. If I opened it now, I would have to look at the postmarks and the handwriting I had spent a decade trying to forget.
The silence of the house pressed against my ears. I could hear Shannon whispering to Lucille in the bedroom at the end of the hall, their voices a soft, rapid murmur.
I pulled my hand away from the cold brass closet knob in the dark.
The florist shop smelled of wet soil and cold leaves, a damp chill that stayed in the back of my throat long after we walked inside. Adele stood by the refrigerated glass case, her winter coat still buttoned to her chin, her eyes fixed on the pale white rosebuds.
I held the small paper envelope containing forty-two dollars in my coat pocket. It was all we had budgeted for the church aisle decorations, a sum we had agreed on three weeks ago when we sat at the kitchen table with the yellow legal pad.
Adele reached out and touched a stem of the roses, her thumb brushing against a thorn.
“These are four dollars a stem, Dad,” she said.
“We have forty-two dollars left in the flower envelope,” I said.
She set the stem back in the green plastic bucket, her movements slow and deliberate. A small puddle of water had formed on the brown linoleum between our boots from a leaky shelf above.
