“A girl who came home for a checkbook,” he said.

“Objection,” Clare said.

“Counsel is the one testifying.”

“Sustained,” Judge Whitfield said.

“Pick different words.”

The lawyer smiled and picked different words, and they were worse.

Then he called my mother to the stand, and Martha walked up the aisle with her lip caught between her teeth.

She laid her hand flat on the Bible as though it might move under her palm.