Frank walked back into the kitchen carrying two bags of ice like nothing had happened.
Mom instantly stopped talking.
Not slowed down.
Stopped.
He looked at the papers spread across the table, then at me, and smiled too fast. “Well damn,” he said, “y’all having a business meeting without me?”
I said nothing.
I just slid one of the canceled checks across the table.
Nineteen thousand dollars.
“M. Mercer.”
Frank didn’t even touch it.
Mom did.
Her hand started shaking so hard the ice inside the bags crackled when Frank set them down.
Then he looked at her instead of me.
That’s when I knew.
Not affair.
Not gambling.
Fear.
“Geraldine,” he said quietly, “you promised me this was handled.”
I asked who Mercer was.
Mom started crying before either of them answered.
Real crying too. Ugly crying. She kept saying, “I was trying to keep your brother safe.”
I froze.
My brother Daniel had died eleven years ago outside Macon after a supposed overdose behind a storage facility.
Frank finally sat down slow and rubbed both hands over his face.
Then he said, “Daniel never overdosed.”
The whole kitchen went silent except for the refrigerator humming.
Frank told me Daniel owed money to a man named Mercer. Bad money. The kind that follows families after funerals. Mom had been sending payments every month ever since because Mercer claimed Daniel stole something before he disappeared.
“Disappeared?” I said.
Mom looked up at me with mascara running down her cheeks and whispered, “They never found your brother’s body.”
Then somebody knocked three slow times on the front door.
And Frank went completely pale.