Mrs.

Wooten walked me through it slowly.

When Mama came to the bank with the proof she’d found, she’d come with a lawyer too — a legal-aid attorney she’d found on her own and paid, I would later learn, out of the same pantry containers where she hid the cash.

Together they had gone to Delroy and laid it out: sign an admission of what he’d done and put his half of the property into a trust for me, or answer to the district attorney for insurance fraud, with Lonnie beside him.

Delroy had done the math a coward always does.