Chapter 24: Honeycutt

I read the name three times under Simon's porch light.

Winifred Talcott.

It was a beautiful name. Mother had picked it.

Quentin was watching me the way he'd watched the phone before he called Gage.

"It's all done," he said. "You sign at the bottom, and I file it in January. You'd finally be..."

He stopped himself.

I folded the papers back along their creases and slid them into the envelope.

Then I held it out to him.

He didn't take it.

"Quentin."

"I thought," he said, "this was what you wanted. You said it in the boardroom. Three years and I never filed."

"I said you never filed. I didn't say what I wanted."

Gage had gone very quiet on the glider.

Simon had stopped shuffling the cards.

"Mother told you," I said. "On the recording. In the garage."

Quentin closed his eyes.

"Let her choose for herself," he said.

"I'm choosing."

He opened his eyes.

He took the envelope back.

For a second his hands tightened on it.

I saw him want to argue the old way, the way that ended with a locked door.

Then he put it in the inside pocket of his coat.

"What do you want it to say?" he asked.

"My name's Winnie Honeycutt," I said. "I want a paper that says whose daughter I am. And keeps the name Mama gave me when nobody else came."

He nodded slowly.

"Will you need a witness?"

"I'll need a brother."

His face did something complicated.

"I can do that," he said.

In January, at the courthouse in Asheboro, I signed my own papers.

Quentin signed under me, where it said witness, and spelled Honeycutt right on the first try, and the clerk stamped it.

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