Chapter 60: That's Not All of It
I did not move.
That is the single best thing I did that year and it took everything I had.
Every part of me wanted to go up the two steps and take her by the collar of that gardening jacket, and I have done that once in my life, to her daughter, at a prison gate, and it cost me a great deal.
So I stood on the concrete with my hands at my sides and I said nothing for four seconds.
Four seconds is a long time on a porch.
I learned that inside, from a woman named Delphine who ran the laundry and never once repeated herself.
She filled it. People fill it. That is the whole reason you leave it empty.
She said, “They don't give you everything. They never give you everything.”
I said, “Who's they.”
She said, “The county. The lawyers. Whoever.”
A person with nothing to hide names one office. A person covering names three.
She started moving the trowel again, and she moved it faster than she had before, and she put the next bulb in upside down.
I said, “Renata. Who paid Gerald Loomis?”
The forks made a sound.
She said, “Who?”
And there it was, and I nearly laughed, and I am glad I did not.
Because a woman who does not know a name says “Who's that.” A woman who knows a name says “Who?”
That is not evidence. I could not put it in a filing. I wrote it down anyway.
I said, “The lawyer. My lawyer. The one who stood next to me.”
She said, “That was seven years ago.”
“Six and eleven months.”
She said, “You'd have to ask Dean's mother.”
I said, “I'm asking you.”
And Renata put the trowel down.
First time in eleven minutes. She put it across her knees and she looked at me and she gave me the speech, and I had heard it before, in a kitchen, when I was twenty-four and had been awake for thirty hours.
She said: “You had no record. He had one.”
She said: “You had a job and a clean sheet and a face they'd believe. He had a prior and he had a bad reputation in this county.”
She said: “They told us two years. Eighteen months with good time.”
I said, “It was six.”
She said, “That's not on me. That's the judge.”
Then she said the last part, and this is the part she has said to herself so many times that it comes out smooth, like a stone out of a river.
She said: “Nobody made you sign anything, Cass. You signed it. You were an adult in a room and you picked up a pen.”
I said, “Yes. I did.”
That surprised her. She had braced for the other answer.
I said it because it is true and because I am not going to become a person who says otherwise. I picked up the pen. Nobody's hand was on mine.
What she has never had to explain is who put the paper under it, and when.
Then I said, “Where was I when I signed it?”
She said, “What?”
“What room. What building. Who was in it.”
She said, “How would I remember that.”
And I said, “You remembered two years and eighteen months with good time.”
She stood up. She is five foot three and she stood up like a much bigger woman.
She said, “Get off my driveway.”
I said, “All right.”
I said, “One more thing. Then I'll go.”
She waited, which was a mistake.
I said, “When I told you I had the file, you said there was nothing in there. Then you said that's not all of it.”
I said, “Those are two different sentences. Only one of them can be true.”
She went inside and shut the door and I heard the chain go on, which she did at ten in the morning on a Saturday in a neighborhood where nobody locks anything.
The wind chime was still going. Nobody had touched it.
I walked down Fenwick and I did not look at the car.
That took more out of me than the four seconds did.
At the bus stop I took out the deposit slip and wrote on the blank side, in order, everything either of us had said, while it was still exact.
It took me nine minutes and I filled both sides and part of a receipt.
At the top I wrote the date and the time and the place, because a note that does not say when it was made is worth nothing to anybody.
Then I sat on the bench with the paper folded in my hand.
Here is the fact.
I never told her a single thing was wrong with that file. I said I had it. That is all I said.
She was the one who told me there was something missing from it.