I didn’t have a speech.

I told her I’d found the tin.

I told her I’d been to the bank, and seen Mrs.

Wooten, and read the last page.

I told her I was sorry — sorry that I’d ever pitied her, sorry it had taken me until the day after her funeral to see who she was, sorry she’d carried all of it alone for twenty years because the men in her house left her no other way to fight.

And then I told her thank you, which was the thing I’d driven out there to say, the thing she had arranged her whole secret life so that I would someday have reason to say.