"Josie," she said. She was holding a bouquet of grocery-store roses in cellophane, yellow ones, my favorite, which she knew. "Josie, honey. You looked so beautiful."
"Thank you," I said.
"Can I hug you?"
I thought about it. I genuinely thought about it, standing there in a polyester gown with my cap in my hand, and I could feel Tasha behind me, not saying anything, and I could see my father fifteen feet back by the concession stand, not coming closer.
"Not yet," I said.
My mother's face folded in on itself. She nodded. She held out the roses and I took them, because I'm not cruel, and because they were yellow.
My father came up then. He stood behind her with his hands in the pockets of his sport coat.
"You've made your point, Josephine," he said. "It's been six weeks. Your mother's sick over this. Enough's enough."
"It's not a point, Dad," I said. "It's not something I'm making. It's something you did."
"I've said I'd put the money back."
"With Grandma's trust. With money that's not yours either."
"That money belongs to your mother."
"Then why does she look like that?" I said, and my mother turned her face away, and my father looked at her, and for a second I saw him not know something, and I don't think I had ever seen my father not know something before. Then it closed up again.
"When you're ready to apologize for how you spoke to us," he said, "you know where we live."
"I do," I said. "I grew up there."
And I went to find Grant, who picked me up off the ground in a bear hug, cap and gown and roses and all, in front of everybody, and told me I was the smartest person he had ever met and that he was going to tell Dad everything on Sunday.
* * *
He told Dad on Sunday. I wasn't there. I know what happened because Grant called me at 4:30 that afternoon from the parking lot of the Food City on Hixson Pike, sitting in the Silverado, and talked for forty minutes in a voice I'd never heard out of him, steady and flat and very tired, like a man reading his own incident report.
He'd told them at the kitchen table, after church, after pot roast. Everything. January. The withdrawal. Chattanooga State, the clinicals, the AutoZone, the Y parking lot. Then he'd put the M4's key fob on the table, next to the gravy boat, and the title next to that, and said he'd already called the dealership in Knoxville and he was driving it up on Wednesday.