And within two days, every single time, you sent it straight to his bookie.
You weren’t sick, Ramona.
You were the middleman.”
Her grieving-mother face came apart all at once.
“He just needed time!” she snapped, and there it was.
“The old man was supposed to sign!
If he’d just signed, none of this —”
She heard herself a half-second too late.
My father had stepped out onto the porch behind me.
And Otis was in the doorway with his phone up, and he’d gotten every word — her knowing about the deed plot, out of her own mouth, on camera.
She realized it, spat something about God punishing me, and hurried off down the walk clutching her rosary.
I shut the door on her.
And I noticed, closing it, that for the first time in my entire life the word family had just been used to shame me and it hadn’t worked.
The spell was broken.