"Ampi wrote her name on the box," she said. "And then she wrote something else under it and scratched it off. I tried to read it. I think it said sorry."
He went to his mother's house on Thursday evening, without calling first.
She answered the door in her cardigan with her glasses on their beaded chain, and she looked past him at the empty driveway and back at him, and said, "Where's Bryony?" and he said, "Home," and she stepped back to let him in. The house smelled the way it had smelled his whole life, of furniture polish and the cinnamon sachets she kept in the coat closet. On the hall table was the same brass dish that had held his father's keys until his father died. He did not take off his coat.
They sat at the kitchen table, where she had written the list. He laid the Meritrust statement down between them, and beside it, after a moment, he laid a folded square of lined paper that Leti had taken from the drawer of her nightstand that morning and handed him without a word. It was the note she had written in April and never mailed. He had read it in the truck. It was four lines long. Winifred, I can't take this. I'm not going anywhere. I won't tell him. Please let us be. L.
His mother looked at the statement. She did not touch it. Then she unfolded the note and read it, and folded it again along its crease, and set it down precisely where it had been.
"She told you," Winifred said.
"Amparo told me. She was under the porch."
His mother closed her eyes very briefly. It was, he thought, the first time in his life he had seen her surprised by a child.
"I won't pretend I didn't do it," she said. "I'm not going to insult you. I did it. I would have told you so if you'd asked me straight out, on Sunday."
"You gave me a list of what she spent your money on and told me to ask her where she got it."
"Yes."
"You wanted me to catch her. You wanted me to think she'd done something with our money, so I'd throw her out, and you'd never have to say what you did."
"I wanted you to see her," Winifred said. "I wanted you to see that she'd taken twenty thousand dollars from an old woman and stayed anyway, and spent every cent of it on her own children while Bryony did without. That is what she did, Barrett. Whatever else is true. You saw that list. That's what that woman is."