"How many times have you watched something on that phone and not told me?"
He made himself look at her. "The rug," he said. "In August. I didn't see him spill it. I saw him carry the cup up, and I saw him come down without it. I told myself it wasn't proof."
Lorraine closed her eyes.
"The tablet," Calvin said. "I think. I saw him with it on the sofa, standing on the cushions, I didn't see it fall. And the money in your purse last spring—your purse was on the hall bench, and I saw him by it. I saw him by it, Lorraine. And then you found it in his shoe, and I thought—I thought you'd put it together. I thought you'd figured it out and decided not to say. I didn't want to be the one to—"
"To what."
"To make you choose."
The word sat there between them in the yellow light. He had not known he was going to say it until he did.
"Choose," Lorraine repeated.
"Between them." His voice was rough. He cleared his throat. "That's how it is in this house. You know it is. You've got one that's easy and one that's not, and you decided a long time ago which one gets the benefit of the doubt, and every time I thought about saying something, I thought about what it would do to you. To hear it. And I thought about what it would do to him, to get caught, when he's so little. And I thought she's tough, she's like you, she can take it. And I kept my mouth shut." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "I kept my mouth shut, and I bought carpet cleaner. That's what I did. That's my part."
He waited for her to scream at him. Instead she put both hands flat on the counter behind her and lean back against it, very slowly, as if her knees might not hold.
"She's not like me," Lorraine said. "She's like my mother."
***
That was the thing Lorraine had never said to anyone, not to Calvin, not to her pastor, not to the grief counselor she had seen exactly twice the autumn after the funeral before deciding she didn't have time.
Simone looked like Hattie. Not a nose here, a chin there. She looked like Hattie the way a photograph looks like a person. She had Hattie's long, watchful eyes and Hattie's habit of tilting her head when she was listening hard, and Hattie's ear, God help them all, the ear that could pick a harmony out of nothing. When Simone sang in the shower, which she did not know anyone could hear, Lorraine sometimes had to stop whatever she was doing and stand still in the hallway with her hand over her mouth.
And Hattie had not been an easy mother. That was the other thing nobody knew, or nobody said. Hattie had been funny and talented and stubborn and fiercely, fiercely loved by the whole congregation of Mount Olive Baptist, and she had been hard on her oldest daughter in ways she was never hard on her son. Lorraine's brother Russell could break a window, wreck the car, come home at three in the morning smelling of somebody else's cigarettes, and Hattie would say, "Boys, Lord," and shake her head and laugh. Lorraine could bring home a B-plus and hear about it for a week. Lorraine had been the responsible one, the one who should have known better, the one who was blamed when Russell got into the cookie tin because she had been in charge, she had been watching, she was older, she should have known. Lorraine had grown up keeping a list of her own.