Chapter 2: Four Hundred and Twelve Dollars

Zariah

The repast was in the fellowship hall, and it smelled like every funeral I'd ever attended in my life, baked chicken and collards and macaroni in foil pans, sweet tea in a five-gallon dispenser sweating on a folding table, the particular institutional smell of a church basement that no amount of Fabuloso ever fully beat. The church ladies had done it right. They always did it right, more food than the small gathering could eat in a week, Sister Coretta already fixing plates to send home, because you did not let anybody leave a repast hungry, that was love you could carry out in your hands.

I shook more hands. I ate three bites of a chicken thigh I didn't taste. I listened to Deacon Freeman tell a story about my father getting the church van lost coming back from Stone Mountain, and I laughed at the right place because my father would have wanted me to, and the entire time I thought about the number.

Four hundred and twelve dollars.

That was what was in my father's checking account. I'd logged in from my phone that morning before the service, standing in the bathroom in the too-new dress, because I was an executor now and executors looked at accounts, and there it had been in gray digital numbers that didn't care about me at all: $412.06. A lifetime of work. A duplex he rented. A car worth maybe two thousand on a good day. A safe-deposit box at a bank I'd never once heard him mention, the key to which I hadn't found and couldn't find and had half convinced myself didn't exist. And four hundred and twelve dollars, six cents.

You did not buy a walnut casket with four hundred and twelve dollars. You did not buy the handles on a walnut casket with it.

I was doing that math again, where the money came from, where it went, why, when the man in the gray suit found me by the coffee urn.

He was white, sixtyish, with the soft apologetic hunch of a man who delivered bad news for a living and had never once gotten used to it. The suit was gray and good but a size too generous through the shoulders, like it had been made for a bigger man, or for the man he'd been ten pounds ago. He held a leather portfolio flat against his chest with both arms crossed over it, the way you'd hold something you were afraid to set down.

"Miss Brooks?" His voice was low, pitched under the room. "I'm sorry to intrude today of all days. I'm Gerald Voss. I, did some work for your father. Legal and financial. For a number of years." He glanced around the hall, at the church ladies wrapping plates, at Deacon Freeman watching from near the door with the mild territorial concern of a man who'd known me since I was in pigtails. "Is there somewhere we could speak privately? It concerns his affairs. It won't keep, or I promise you I wouldn't do this to you here."

His affairs. Again. I set down my Styrofoam cup of coffee I hadn't drunk and wiped my palms on the black dress and said, "This way."

I led him out of the hall and down the cinderblock corridor to the Sunday-school room, the little one off the back, walls painted the yellow of old teeth, a felt board still pinned crooked to the wall with the story of the loaves and the fishes half told across it. Tiny plastic chairs in primary colors were stacked against one wall and scattered across the linoleum. I'd learned John 3:16 in this room. I'd been baptized down the hall. It seemed as good a place as any to find out what my father had really been.

I righted a child's chair and sat in it because it was the only kind there was, knees up nearly to my chest, and I folded my hands and put on the face, the courtroom face, the one I'd built in bathroom mirrors for three years of law school, the one that gave a hostile room absolutely nothing. Voss took the little red chair across from me and looked, on it, deeply ridiculous, a grown man folded into kindergarten, and neither of us acknowledged it.

"Mr. Voss," I said. "I've buried my father, I've eaten funeral chicken, and I have exactly no patience left for anybody who talks around the point. I know what a preamble sounds like. So skip yours. Say the point."

Something moved behind his eyes, not quite a smile, but the ghost of professional respect, the look of a man who'd expected a grieving girl and found a lawyer. He liked it. I could tell he liked it, and I filed that away, because a man who respected you was a man you could work.

"All right," he said. He set the portfolio on his knees and opened it. "Your father was party to a private financial arrangement. A substantial one. It wasn't a bank loan. There's no branch, no regulator, no court that issued it." He turned a page. His hands were very steady, which somehow made it worse. "The principal was extended to him over a period of years by an entity called St. James Holdings. The current outstanding balance, with the terms as agreed, is two million, three hundred thousand dollars."

The number didn't land. It was too big, a number for buildings, for other people's lives, for the towers going up in Buckhead. It sat in the yellow room and refused to attach itself to my father, to the Buick, to the four hundred and twelve dollars, to the man who'd cried at my graduation.

"That's not possible," I said. My voice came out flat and reasonable, the voice I used when a number on a page was simply wrong and needed correcting. "My father cut coupons. My father drove a Buick with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. My father had four hundred and twelve dollars in the bank this morning. I checked. You're telling me a man with four hundred dollars owed two million three?"

"Your father," Voss said gently, "was a bookkeeper. For the last nine years, at least, he handled accounts for St. James Holdings and certain related interests. He was very good at it, genuinely, one of the best I ever saw at moving a number so it stayed still. He was paid extremely well." A pause, weighted with the thing he clearly didn't want to say. "He was also, in the last year or so of his life, not entirely honest with his employers about certain funds. Money that should have been in one place turned up in another. Or turned up nowhere at all."

"He stole." I made myself say the word so he wouldn't have to soften it into oblivion. "From these, St. James people. You're telling me my father was a thief and these were the people he stole from."

"I'm telling you what the ledgers appear to show." Voss turned another page in the portfolio, and then he turned the whole thing around on his knees and held it out to me, and his hand was not quite as steady now. "But that isn't the part I came to tell you today, Miss Brooks. If it were only money, I wouldn't have intruded on your grief. Money can be argued. Money can be settled or written off or fought about in the light of day." He tapped the page with one finger. "This is a copy of the security instrument. The contract that secured the loan. I need you to read the collateral clause. Take your time. Read it more than once."

I took the portfolio.

The document was three pages, dense, single-spaced, the language too clean for anything my father could have drafted, but my father's signature was on the last page in the slanted meticulous hand I'd learned to read from grocery lists and birthday cards. I read the collateral clause. My eyes slid off the words the first time like they'd been greased, and I made myself go back to the top and read it again, slower, the way I read a statute, and the second time I understood every word and wished with my whole body that I didn't.

In the event of default by reason of death or incapacity, and absent liquid recovery, the Lender may accept in partial satisfaction such collateral as the Lender deems of equivalent value, including but not limited to the person, labor, or presence of,

And then a name, filled in by hand, in the margin, in my father's slanted careful script.

Zariah Danielle Brooks.

My date of birth beneath it. My Social Security number, the last four boxed and underlined. My name in my father's own hand, the same hand that had written Happy Birthday baby girl on nineteen cards, the same hand that had written proud of you on a Post-it stuck to my acceptance letter, signing me over on the back end of a debt like I was a car title, like I was the Buick, like I was collateral he could pledge because a daughter was a thing a man owned.

The room went very quiet. Or maybe that was just me, all the sound in me draining down and out through the little plastic chair into the linoleum.

I want to say the first thing I felt was rage. It wasn't. The first thing I felt, before I got the door shut on it, was the oldest thing I knew, that small cold childhood certainty that I was a thing to be spent. My mother had spent me for her freedom. And now here was proof, in my daddy's own careful hand, that the one person I'd trusted never to do it had done it too.

"He signed me," I said. My voice came from somewhere far away, some other Zariah standing in some other room. "My father signed me over as collateral on a two-million-dollar debt. To pay off what he stole. He put my name in the margin."

"I don't believe an instrument like this is enforceable," Voss said quickly, leaning forward, urgent now, the apology gone out of him and something like real fear come in to replace it. "No court in this country would enforce it, Miss Brooks. You didn't sign it. You didn't consent. It's, it's barely even a contract, it's a threat with a signature line. If it ever came to a courtroom, you would win, and it would take an afternoon."

"But," I said, because there was a but sitting in the man's face as plain as the collateral clause.

"But," Voss said, and lowered his voice until I had to lean in over the little chairs to catch it, "the men on the other side of that instrument are not, as a rule, in the habit of going to court."

Out in the corridor, past the crooked felt board and the story of the loaves and the fishes, I heard the fellowship-hall door open and shut, and heard the church ladies' chatter stop all at once, the way a room full of birds goes silent when a hawk's shadow crosses the yard.

"Who," I said. The animal behind the glass had stopped pacing entirely. It was standing at the open door, listening, hackles up. "Who holds the note, Mr. Voss? Whose name is on the Lender line?"

Voss opened his mouth to answer me.

He never got the chance. Down the corridor, unhurried, a heavy door was already opening, and the yellow light in the little room seemed to dim by a degree, and I felt the air change against the back of my neck, felt the whole church reorganize itself, somehow, around whatever had just walked in the front.