Day Seven I Signed It novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Day Seven

My mother arrived at the cemetery gate in her church coat with a manila folder against her chest.

She would not say a word until we were sitting on the bench by the cedar tree, a hundred feet from my father's stone.

"The key was in his watch box," Joan said. "I never looked in the watch box. Thirty-eight years married, and I thought, he's entitled to one drawer."

She opened the folder.

It held bank statements, folded in thirds, with a rubber band around them.

Every one showed the same payment, on the first of the month, to the same account.

D. Roche.

"Fifteen hundred dollars," my mother said. "Every month, for thirty years, until the month he died."

I looked at the name until the letters stopped meaning anything.

"I always knew there was a woman," she said. "I'm not stupid, Colin. I knew when you were small. I decided I wouldn't ask."

"Mom."

"I'm not asking you to forgive him for me. I'm asking you not to hear the name Roche in a room and feel nothing."

I said, "Gavin Roche."

My mother closed the folder.

"I haven't said that," she said. "You said it."

I slept very little that night.

At ten the next morning I stood on my own front steps for the third time that week, with a manila envelope of my own.

It was day seven, and the lawyer had called me back on Friday, so the papers were ready.

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