Chapter 11: The Offers

I slept on a friend's couch, and I woke at four in the morning with my hand stretched across the cushion.

There was nobody there.

I put the hand back under the blanket.

At eight the hospital's president called to say the suspension was lifted and the complaint withdrawn.

He said it twice, fast, and did not apologize.

At nine-thirty Lowell Bexley knocked on my friend's door.

He stood on the landing in a navy overcoat with his reading glasses hanging on their cord.

He had not slept.

"May I come in, Dessa?"

My friend had left for her shift.

I let him sit at the kitchen table.

He took an envelope from his coat and laid it in front of me.

"Two million dollars," he said. "A cashier's check. I want you to understand it is not a bribe."

"What is it?"

"It's fifty times what my son took from you." He took off his glasses.

"In exchange, you sign an annulment. A short form."

"And?"

"You tell my brother you made a mistake, and you go back to your life."

"My life," I said.

"You have the ward, your mother, the apartment. Nobody will touch them."

"And Ford?"

"My brother," Lowell said slowly, "has never been in a room with money and kept it."

He rubbed his eyes.

"He gets bored, or he gets proud, and he gives it away. If the vote stays with him, he'll throw it in the lake."

"And?"

"Do you know what that does to eleven hundred employees?"

I looked at the envelope.

I thought about what two million dollars would do for my mother's knee, and her roof, and her whole life.

I pushed it back across the table.

"I don't take charity," I said.

"It isn't charity."