"What do I do with that?"
"Nothing, child. It's a fact." Eunice picked up her handbag again. "You collect enough facts about a person, you might end up seeing one."
Nathaniel came in then, phone still in his hand, and Lindsay had never seen his face look like that — wide open, younger by twenty years. "Howard," he said to his mother. "He just found out. He's screaming. Celia's crying in a supply closet at the hospital."
Eunice said, "Well, of course," as though she had arranged it personally, and then put her hand flat on her son's chest for a moment, and neither of them said anything. Lindsay looked out the window until it was over.
At a quarter to ten Kyra arrived with eleven members of the cooperative's board, women in their good church clothes and their good work shoes, Ghanaian and Dominican and Jamaican and Filipina, a few of them carrying their own pens. Kyra's mother, Abena Osei, sixty-three, president of the board and a home health aide for twenty-eight years, came in last. She looked at the room, the leather chairs, the city, and said something in Twi to her daughter that made Kyra laugh out loud — the first time Lindsay had ever heard her laugh.
Nathaniel pulled out the chair at the head of the table and held it.
"Mrs. Osei," he said. "I think this is yours."
Abena Osei sat in it the way you would sit in any chair, which was, Lindsay thought, the whole point.
The members filled the sides. Anjali and Rafael took the places nearest the papers. Lindsay went to the far end, by the door, with a legal pad, to take notes no one had asked her to take. Eunice Turner stood beside the table for a moment, handbag in both hands, looking at the high-backed brown leather chair in front of her as if it were a step she wasn't sure would hold.
Lindsay got up and pulled it out.