He wanted to say that was not true, and he thought of the green sofa in the den, and the photographs on his mother's refrigerator, which he had looked at every Sunday for three years. Bryony in a Halloween costume. Bryony at a recital. Bryony on a cliff in Ireland with her hair blowing across her face. He tried to remember a single photograph of Itzel or Amparo anywhere in his mother's house, and could not, and understood that he could not because there was none.
"And then I kept going," Leti said. "That's the part I want you to know. It wasn't a correction after a while. It was just spending. The car was the car. The volleyball was real, Itzel's good, she's really good, a coach from Washburn talked to her in Omaha. But the iPad was me being angry. The ring was me being angry. Every time I bought something it was like I was writing your mother a letter she would never read." She looked down. "And Bryony asked for Orlando. And I had the money. And I thought, let Winifred pay for it. Let Winifred see her granddaughter go without, for once. Let her see what it's like. And I watched you tell Bryony no, and I didn't say anything." Her voice did not break. It went lower, and slower, and that was worse. "I made a thirteen-year-old pay a bill I owed her grandmother. That's what I did. That's the thing I can't fix by mailing a check. That's the thing I'm ashamed of. Not the rest. I'm not ashamed of the car."
He sat at the foot of the bed with his hands between his knees. The furnace breathed in the wall.
"Why didn't you tell me," he said. "In April. Why didn't you just tell me."
"Would you have believed me?"
He opened his mouth to say yes.
She waited for him. She gave him all the time he needed, and that was how he knew she already knew the answer, and that she had known it in April sitting on the porch swing with the envelope in her lap: that he would have listened, and been shocked, and then would have driven to his mother's house, and his mother would have looked at him over her glasses with that terrible patience and said, Barrett, I would never, and he would have come home and said, Are you sure you understood her, Leti? Are you sure that's what she meant? Because his mother had made pot roast for him every Sunday of his life. Because she had sat on the bathroom floor with his daughter. Because he had never once in forty-four years had to imagine her as anything but what she said she was.
"I don't know," he said. "I'd like to think so."