Winifred did not say anything for a long time. Her hand went to her glasses, to the beaded chain, and turned one of the beads between her finger and thumb, a small blue one, and he remembered that a girl named Rosalyn Peet in the fifth grade at Minneha had made the chain, and that his mother had kept a picture of her on her desk for years after she retired, because Rosalyn Peet had been in foster care and his mother had fought the district for her for three years and won.
"I didn't know she was under the porch," Winifred said finally.
"No."
"I would never have said it in front of a child."
"I know you wouldn't. That's the whole thing, Mom. You'd never say any of it in front of anybody. You'd just write the place cards."
She flinched at that. Not much. He saw it.
"Here's what's going to happen," he said, and he found that his voice was steady and that he did not hate her, which surprised him more than anything else that week. "Leti is going to pay you back. There's three thousand one hundred and twelve dollars left and she's sending you a cashier's check for it tomorrow, and the rest she's paying off a little every month out of her own paycheck until it's done. I told her she didn't have to. I told her it was your money and you threw it at us and you don't get to want it back. She said she wasn't bought, and she won't be kept either. So she's paying it. You're going to take it. You're going to cash every check."
"I don't want it."
"It isn't about what you want." He stood up. "There are no more Sundays with just me and Bryony. You want us for Sunday dinner, you set five places, and you put the same card in front of every one of them, or no cards at all. You're going to come to the house and you're going to apologize to Leti, to her face, and not with a casserole. And Thanksgiving's at our house this year. Two o'clock. You're invited. I'd like you to come." He buttoned his coat. "That's the part I want you to hear. I'd like you to come."
His mother sat at her table with her hands folded on the note.
"And if I can't," she said. "Love them. If I can't do it. You can't make a person do that, Barrett. I was a principal. You can make a child sit in a chair. You can't make them want to be there."