Lorraine Hale had been Coleman then, married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-six, a daughter in the middle of the paperwork. Derrick had been a warehouse lead with a temper he had since put down and a habit of leaving before the hard sentence. The divorce gave Lorraine the house in Dayton and a support number he had actually paid. Paying was the part of him that worked. Saying the name at a new table was the part that did not. He met Patrice at thirty-one. He said he had been married. He did not say the child. Selected truth. The selection had lasted seventeen years and a sister.
Vanessa had found the ledger in their mother’s papers, a carbon of a money order, Imani Hale, Dayton. Mama had kept it because Mama kept everything. Vanessa had waited through the funeral, through the summer, through the moment a empty chair got set for a woman who was dead and not for a girl who was alive. Waiting was over. She stood in the kitchen door now and did not apologize.
“She should know before the prayer,” Vanessa said. “That is the whole of it.”
“You did it in front of the table,” Derrick said.