Chapter 3
The name lay on the tablecloth.
For one second, nothing moved.
Then Delia laughed.
It had no air in it.
"Verna Tillis," she said.
"I have never met that woman in my life."
"You signed the same page she did," Rhonda said.
"I signed what my lawyer put in front of me."
Delia stood and straightened her silk.
"Here is what happens now."
"My lawyer will be in this tent by eight."
"Your folder is worth what a typed page is worth."
"Nothing."
Then she looked at Cole.
"Tell your aunt I want her key back."
Cole took the office key off his ring.
He set it on the table.
"Yes, ma'am."
He didn't look away from her.
Delia picked it up like it was dirty.
Deputy Warren closed the folder and handed it back to Rhonda.
"Ma'am, private adoption is legal."
"Whatever this is, it's a family matter."
"It's not a crime."
"It's a forged record," Rhonda said.
"Prove it in court," the deputy said.
"It's not a crime yet."
He walked her out to the gate.
The guests watched her go.
Glasses up again.
Laughter, thin and careful.
The band started back in.
That was the part that hurt.
At the gate, someone caught up.
Mack, in her ivory slip, out of breath.
She pressed a slip of paper into Rhonda's hand.
"My number," she said.
"Don't leave town."
Rhonda looked at her daughter's face in the dark.
"I waited twenty-three years for this," she said.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She drove home to a single-wide off County Road 9.
She sat in the truck outside it and did the math.
Twenty-three years ago she was twenty-one.
Unmarried. Living at home. Working the register at the feed store.
Her mother had sent her to Fort Worth to stay with a cousin.
She had never met the cousin.
The babies came at a hospital there.
Two cries.
Two weights.
Four pounds, three ounces.
Three pounds, eleven.
She had held the smaller one for one minute.
Then her mother had taken her.
The list came slow, like counting fence posts.
Her mother had chosen the funeral home.
Her mother had picked out the two little boxes.
Her mother had paid the man in cash.
Her mother had told the neighbors the girl had been sick.
Her mother had kept her in bed for a month.
And in twenty-three years, her mother had never once driven her out to the graves.
Rhonda had asked. Twice.
Both times her mother said the ground was too soft.
At two in the morning, her phone lit up.
Mack.
"Are you awake?"
"I'm awake."
"I found a folder," Mack said.
"Her lawyer's copy. She keeps it in her desk."
"It has my birth certificate in it."
Rhonda sat up.
"Read me the part about the mother."
Mack read it.
"Rhonda Mae Tillis. Age twenty-one. Deceased."
The word sat in the dark between them.
"There's a death certificate too," Mack said.
"Female. Twenty-one. Died in childbirth."
"Filed eleven days after I was born."
Rhonda could hear the paper shaking in her hand.
"I'm holding it," Mack said.
"Who is Verna Tillis?"
"That's my mother," Rhonda said.
Mack went quiet for a long time.
"The informant on the death certificate is Verna Tillis," she said.
"She signed it."
"Nobody else. Just her."
Rhonda had a driver's license.
She had a Social Security card.
She had filed her taxes in April.
None of that mattered.
Somebody had written her dead on paper, and other people had believed it.
She stared at her own name in her mind.
Rhonda Mae Tillis. Deceased.
Somebody had killed her on paper and gone to church on Sunday.
She knew who.
It was the woman who had taught her how to pray.