The judge was a severe woman who had presided over the circuit court for eleven years. She didn’t suffer fools. She silently reviewed the purple-inked waiver. She read Mr. Duca’s petition. She lowered her reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and pinned Renata’s lawyer with a stare that could freeze water.
“Counselor,” the judge said, her voice echoing in the cavernous room. “If the trust funds were, in fact, properly dispersed for the beneficiary’s support, a forensic accounting will clearly demonstrate that, and your client will be gloriously vindicated. I am hereby ordering a full, itemized accounting from the date of funding to the present day, to be filed directly with this court within sixty days.”
The gavel cracked. It was over in eleven minutes.
Nine days after the judge’s decree, the pharmacy phone rang. I was currently ringing up a frail gentleman purchasing a birthday card and three boxes of cherry cough drops.
“Honey, there’s a ‘Royal’ holding on line one for you. He claims it’s a family emergency.”
My stomach tightened. I excused myself and retreated to the dim quiet of the stockroom, leaning against a towering pallet of adult diapers.
“Hello?”
“Hey there, kiddo! How’s that beautiful grandbaby?” Royal’s voice boomed through the receiver.
“Marigold is fine, Royal,” I said, my voice flat. “What exactly do you want?”
“Listen, kiddo,” he shifted gears, his tone adopting a fake, conspiratorial warmth. “I’m calling to play the peacemaker here. This whole legal circus? It’s tearing your mother apart. She is absolutely devastated.”
Devastated. The word hung in the air, dripping with irony.
“So, I was thinking,” Royal continued smoothly, “what’s it gonna take to make this headache go away? Let’s put on our adult pants. How about I write you a personal check right now for a few thousand bucks? Buy some nice things for the baby. We shake hands, drop the lawyers, and everybody goes back to enjoying Sunday dinners together like none of this ugliness ever happened.”
I pressed the phone against my ear, speechless at the sheer audacity.
“I’ll make it five thousand dollars, Jana. Cash. Come on, be smart. Lawyers charge by the hour. Your grandmother’s bank account isn’t bottomless, and frankly, the old bird isn’t going to live forever.”
I pulled the phone away from my face and pressed the red END button.
When I relayed the conversation to Mr. Duca later that afternoon, the old attorney removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the tail of his silk tie.
“Miss Kersey,” he murmured, a dangerous smile playing on his lips. “In thirty years of litigating fraud, I have never once had a guilty party offer me thousands of dollars to make ‘nothing’ stop.”
Two days after Royal’s failed bribery attempt, Renata brought the war to my front door.
It was the first time I’d laid eyes on her since the afternoon Marigold was born—a visit where she had breezed into my hospital room, complained about the cafeteria coffee for twenty minutes, snapped a selfie for Facebook, and vanished.
She joined my checkout line, standing rigidly behind a man purchasing bulk antacids.
When he shuffled away, she stepped up to my register. She placed nothing on the counter. She stood there, gripping her BMW keys so tightly her knuckles were white.
“You are humiliating me,” she hissed, pitching her voice low to evade Wava’s radar. “You are dragging my name through the mud in front of the entire family. In front of my congregation. Do you comprehend the damage you are causing?”
My hands shook as I rested them on the scanner. “Hi, Mom. Did you want to see a picture of the baby? She’s at daycare right now, but she has your nose.”
Renata’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Drop the lawsuit, Jana. Call that fossil of a lawyer today and tell him you’re withdrawing the petition. Do that, and I will find it in my heart to forgive you, and we can go back to normal.”
All the fear I’d harbored for twenty-six years evaporated under the harsh fluorescent lights of the CVS.
“Show me the binder, Mom,” I said, my voice steady and loud enough for the next customer in line to hear. “If you spent my father’s money on me, just show me the receipts. That is literally all I have ever asked.”
She stared at me for three agonizing seconds. I watched the gears grind in her head as she actively suppressed the urge to scream ‘After everything I spent on you!’
Wava leaned far over the elevated pharmacy counter, her eyebrows practically touching her hairline. “Lord have mercy, honey. Who was that?”
“That,” I breathed, my heart pounding in my throat, “was my mother.”
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