He called her at nine thirty. "How are you holding up?"
"I made soup," she said. "I had to do something with my hands."
"Did you eat any?"
"A little. Don't change the subject."
He smiled despite himself. "All right. How are you really?"
There was a pause long enough that he wondered if the call had dropped. Then she said, "I'm ashamed, baby. I know I shouldn't be, but I keep thinking about the people looking at me. All those eyes. I wonder what they told their families at dinner. I wonder whether anyone believed him."
Darius closed his laptop. "He was the one who behaved disgracefully."
"I know that here." She tapped her temple, and he could almost see the gesture. "But feelings don't always arrive at the truth as quickly as thoughts do."
"Mama, I hate that you were there alone."
"I wasn't entirely alone. Miss Alvarez tried. And I know you were in the room, even if I didn't see you at first. Still, I spent most of that morning feeling like I had somehow wandered into a place where everybody already knew I didn't belong."
Darius remembered being eight years old, sitting beside his father in a hardware store while a clerk followed them from aisle to aisle. Thomas had finished buying the screws he needed, paid in cash, and thanked the clerk calmly. In the car afterward, Darius had asked why they had not gotten angry.
Thomas had answered, "You must know when anger will make a difference and when it will only give somebody else the story he wants to tell." Darius had misunderstood the lesson for years. He had thought it meant swallowing every slight. His mother had always understood that it meant choosing a response powerful enough to survive the moment.
"You taught me to keep records," he said.
"Your daddy taught both of us that."
"I'm using them."
"Then use them for all those people, not just for me."
Before they hung up, he asked whether she wanted him to send groceries, arrange transportation, or help her prepare for the next call with the settlement administrator. She accepted help with the telephone call and declined everything else. He did not take offense. Loving Loretta meant respecting that she was a person long before she was anybody's mother.
Across town, Harlon sat alone in his office after the cleaning crew had finished. His phone rested on the desk beside a glass of bourbon he had brought from the private cabinet he kept hidden beneath a shelf. He had spent the afternoon telling himself that Monday's incident was finished. Customers complained every week, and most complaints vanished after a manager wrote a report containing the words misunderstanding and standard procedure. He had become skilled at producing that language.