"This is a letter of wishes," she said. "It isn't binding. It's your grandmother explaining herself to me, so I'd understand the paragraph if I ever had to use it. I think she'd want you to read it. I think she'd want your mother to read it more."
It was one page.
Lorraine, if you are reading this, then Denise has done what I did, and I am sorry, because it means I taught her. You know about Wade. Everybody at church knew about Wade. I paid for his schooling at Knoxville and bought him that red Camaro when he was nineteen, and when Denise got into Middle Tennessee I told her we couldn't manage it, and she went to Chattanooga State for typing and bookkeeping and never said one word to me about it, not one, for forty years. Wade flunked out by spring and wrecked the Camaro by summer. Denise ran a church office and raised two children and nursed me through this. I watched her pour everything into that boy of hers the way I poured it into mine, and I watched her look at her girl the way I looked at her, like a weed that'll grow anywhere so why bother with the water. I could not fix what I did. I am trying to put one thing right before I go. If it does not work, give Denise my mother's pearls and tell her I knew. Tell her I always knew what I did to her. Tell her I was too proud to say so to her face, and I am saying it now. Ida.
I read it three times. Then I folded it back along its creases and handed it to Lorraine.
"Does she know about Wade," I said, "that he—"
"Your uncle lives in Panama City Beach and sells timeshares and calls your mother every Christmas to ask for money," Lorraine said. "Yes. She knows."
* * *
Lorraine set the meeting for the following Thursday at four o'clock in her old office downtown on Georgia Avenue, which she still kept, she said, for occasions requiring a conference table. She told my parents it concerned the trust. She told me I could bring whoever I wanted, and I brought Grant, who came straight off a twelve-hour shift in his navy polo, smelling like hand sanitizer.
My parents were already there when we came in. My father stood up. My mother didn't; I don't think she could. She looked older than in May. She'd stopped coloring her hair and there was a stripe of gray at the part, and she was wearing the cardigan she wore to funerals.
"Josie," my father said. And then, to Grant, nothing. Just a nod, like they were men who'd once worked a job together.