Chapter 1: The Dress She Didn't Own

Zariah

The dress was too new to be a mourning dress.

I'd bought it that morning off a rack at a boutique in West End, the tags still bunched in my fist while I stood at the counter blinking against the fluorescent light, because I hadn't owned anything black that wasn't jeans. Twenty-four years old and I'd never once needed a funeral dress. I had a graduation dress, three weeks old, hanging in my closet with the receipt still stapled to the bag. I had a mock-trial suit worn shiny at the elbows. I had nothing at all for this, for a June morning at Providence Missionary Baptist with my father in a box at the front of the sanctuary and the whole world expecting me to know how to stand.

Now the fabric clung to the backs of my knees in the heat, sweat gathering where the seams pressed, and I thought, absurdly, that I'd have to remember to keep the receipt. That I could return it. That there was no version of the coming weeks where I'd want to look at this dress again, or the shoes pinching my toes, or the church program folded into a damp square in my palm with my father's face on the cover.

The pastor had a voice like warm gravel, and he used all of it. A man who loved his daughter. A man of second chances. A man who came home to the Lord. I kept my eyes on the casket and did the math on it the way I'd started doing the math on everything now, where the money came from, where it went, why. Walnut. Brushed brass handles. A satin lining the color of butter that I'd glimpsed at the viewing before they closed him in. More expensive than anything Marcus Brooks had ever admitted to affording in his life.

I knew, because I'd handled his money since I was fourteen, balanced his checkbook while he called out numbers from the recliner, talked the electric company into a payment plan the winter the furnace died. I knew, better than anyone alive, exactly how much my father did not have. And a man who drove a fifteen-year-old Buick and clipped coupons for canned peaches, actual paper coupons, snipped with the good scissors on Sunday afternoons, did not lie down for his eternal rest in two thousand dollars of hardwood.

Somebody had paid for that box. Somebody who wasn't me.

Where the money came from. Where it went. Why. The three questions ran on a loop under the pastor's eulogy like a hymn I couldn't stop humming. I hated that even here, even with him six feet from me in butter-colored satin, my mind refused to grieve when it could audit instead. But that was the only prayer I'd ever really known how to say over my father: let me make the numbers come out right for you. I'd been saying it my whole life. I wasn't going to stop just because he'd stopped breathing.

I'd graduated three weeks ago. He'd been there, third row, in a navy suit I'd never seen, filming me walk across the stage on a phone he held with both hands like it might fly off and shatter. That's my baby, he'd said to the stranger beside him. That's my lawyer. And I'd crossed the stage in borrowed heels thinking about how I was finally going to take care of him now, a job at a firm, a real apartment, the man who'd raised me alone since my mother walked out the door of our old place on Delowe and never once looked back.

Eleven days later a neighbor found him slumped over the kitchen table, cold, a mug of coffee gone to skin beside his hand.

The medical examiner said heart. Said stress, sudden, not uncommon in men his age. Signed a form and handed me a pamphlet on grief counseling with a coffee ring on the corner. I signed my own forms with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking, and I nodded, and I said thank you, and the whole time a cold flat voice at the back of my skull kept saying the one thing I couldn't say out loud in a room full of professionals with clipboards.

He was never sick a day in his life.

My father took the stairs two at a time at fifty-two. He hadn't missed a Sunday or a physical or a dose of the fish oil he swore by. His cholesterol was better than mine. And in the last month of his life he'd started sleeping with the porch light on and the deadbolt thrown, and there was a kitchen knife I found later tucked between the mattress and the box spring, and when I'd asked him about the light he'd laughed and said an old man got jumpy, baby, that's all, don't you worry about me.

I had worried about him my whole life. It was the only religion I'd ever really practiced.

The service moved to the graveside, and the heat came down harder there with no roof to fight it, just a green tent and folding chairs on cemetery astroturf that had never in its life been grass. The church family fanned themselves with the laminated programs. Deacon Freeman kept a hand on my shoulder that I wished, with a low steady desperation, he would move. Sister Coretta cried loud enough for the both of us, great heaving sobs that rose over the pastor's committal, and that was fine, that was a mercy, actually, because it meant nobody was looking at me to see that I couldn't cry at all.

The grief was there. I could feel it the way you feel weather change in a bad knee, a pressure behind the sternum, an animal pacing behind glass. It just would not come out where anyone could see it. I'd learned that trick young. You put the feeling in a room and you shut the door and you dealt with the people in front of you, because somebody in the Brooks house had always had to deal with the people in front of them, and it had never once been my mother and it couldn't be my father, so it was me. It had always been me. Even now, standing over the hole they were going to put him in, I was the one keeping the ledger of who had come and who had sent flowers and who I'd have to thank.

I scanned the tree line while the pastor prayed.

I couldn't help it. It was an old habit, older than I was, a childhood spent at the front window watching for repo men, for the landlord's truck, for the particular slow roll of a car that didn't belong on our street and always meant somebody was about to knock and want something we didn't have. I'd grown up reading cars the way other kids read comic books. And when I scanned the water oaks at the edge of the plots, a hundred feet off, my eyes snagged and stopped.

A man.

White dress shirt, no jacket in the punishing heat. Sunglasses. Standing under the oaks with his hands loose at his sides, not leaning on anything, not fanning himself, not mourning. Just there. Just watching. Watching me. When my gaze caught his, he didn't do the thing. Everybody did the thing at a funeral, you caught a stranger's eye across the grief and you both looked away, embarrassed, respectful, because grief was private even in a public tent.

He didn't look away.

That was what put the cold finger down my spine in ninety-five-degree heat. He held my eyes for one second, two, three, easy and unbothered, and then he lifted two fingers to the brim of a hat he wasn't wearing, a little salute, a little joke, a promise, and my mouth went dry as the astroturf.

I told myself it was nothing. A groundskeeper on his break. A man visiting his own dead across the way, killing time, no manners. There were a hundred harmless reasons a man might stand under a tree, and I fed myself every one of them, and not a single one of them touched the cold in my spine.

I was wrong about a lot of things that week. I would look back on this one, the two fingers, the shirt too clean for a workingman in June, as the first.

The pastor said amen. The folding chairs scraped. The church family came at me in a receiving line I hadn't agreed to, and I shook hands until my fingers ached, and I said thank you and he was a good man and I appreciate you coming on a loop, my courtroom face bolted on so tight my jaw hurt. Somebody pressed a foil-covered plate into my hands. Somebody else took it away again. Sister Coretta held me by both shoulders and looked into my face and said, Baby, you let it out, you hear me, don't you hold it, and I nodded and did not let it out, because if I let it out here I was not sure it would ever go back in the room where I kept it.

When I looked up again, over the deacon's shoulder, past Sister Coretta's hat, the tree line was empty. The man in the white shirt was gone, and I hadn't seen him go, and somehow that was worse than his standing there had been. A man who could vanish from a hundred feet away without your catching the motion was a man who knew how to move. I filed that thought the way I filed everything, quick and cold and out of sight, and I hated that some old instinct in me had already gone to war footing while the rest of me was still burying my daddy.

The undertaker touched my elbow, gentle, professional. Miss Brooks? Whenever you're ready. The repast is set up at the church. And then, because I was a lawyer now and lawyers asked the question even when it was the wrong time, especially when it was the wrong time, I made myself say it while I had him.

"The casket," I said. "The walnut. I need to see the invoice for it."

The undertaker's face did a small careful thing, a flinch smoothed over so fast most people would have missed it. I don't miss things; it's the only inheritance my mother ever left me, a nose for the flinch. "It's, that was handled, Miss Brooks. It's all taken care of. You don't need to worry about-"

"Handled by who?"

"I really think," he said, "this is a conversation for another day."

I held his eyes the way the man under the trees had held mine. "Handled by who."

He looked, for one honest second, like he wished he were anywhere else on earth. Then his professional calm slid back down over his face like a garage door. "You should speak with the gentleman inside," he said. "There's a, there's someone waiting at the church who says he did some work for your father. He asked to have a word." A pause, delicate as a scalpel. "About your father's affairs."

His affairs. My father, who'd had four hundred dollars and a Buick and a Bible and, apparently, a walnut casket paid in cash and a stranger in a gray suit waiting at the church to talk about affairs I'd never heard he had.

I looked at the fresh mound of red Georgia clay where they were about to lay my whole family, and I felt the animal behind the glass go very, very still, the way it goes still right before it notices the door is open.

I peeled the receipt-stiff funeral dress away from the backs of my knees, lifted my chin, and went inside to find out who had bought my father's grave.