“Yes, so you said.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “What did you do with them?”
“Nothing. I mean, nothing back then. I was looking for an aspirin, only then I saw there was a savings book in the packet, and it had my name in it! That was definitely mine. Kitty was coming up the stairs, and first I thought of asking her why she was stealing from me, but I decided to take the packet home with me to see if there were any other financial documents she was keeping for herself.”
I didn’t point out that she’d first been looking for a handkerchief. “And were there any other financial instruments?”
“No, just papers with numbers. I showed them to Martin one day when he came to see me, back when he was in eighth grade, I mean. He’s always been good with numbers, I thought they’d be, like bank accounts or something, but he said they didn’t mean anything to him. Then he wanted to know where I got them. He was only thirteen, but he had the nerve to accuse his own mother of stealing papers when they belonged to me in the first place. Kitty must have been whining about the papers disappearing.”
Along with Kitty’s pearl earrings and a certain amount of cash, I remembered, but I didn’t want to toss a grenade on the conversation.
“So I stuffed them into a drawer and forgot about them, but then, like I told you, a few weeks ago Martin came barreling down to Palfry, wanting to see them again. He tore the place apart looking for them. I kept telling him I didn’t even know if I still had them, but he found them with my birth certificate in this old shoe box in the front room. He got all excited and said, ‘These were supposed to come to me! Why didn’t you show them to me before?’
“I told him I’d shown them to him when he was thirteen and he hadn’t been interested. Was I supposed to wait on him hand and foot, checking every morning to see if he cared about some stupid old papers?”
Judy pounded the arm of her wheelchair with a feeble fist. “It was always like that with him, me, me, me. Why couldn’t he ever see I had needs, too! Even as a baby he was always selfish. It’s why I had to give him to my parents, I couldn’t cope with someone that selfish.”
“Yeah, babies tend to be thoughtless that way,” I said, my throat so tight I had trouble getting the words out. “Why did he think the papers should come to him?”
“Because he could understand some stupid equations in them. Then he started squawking at me; he said didn’t it mean anything to me when I read the cover letter and saw who asked them to be sent to Kitty?”
“Who?” I felt my pulse quicken.
“Some woman named Byron. Ada Byron. How special does that sound?”
I felt let down: I’d been sure they were from Martina, or Benjamin Dzornen. “Was Byron a family name? I mean in your family, your dad’s mother, or the family your mom lived with in England?”
“Oh, those people! No, their name was Painter.” Judy giggled unexpectedly, an unpleasant sound. “He was a builder whose name was Painter, pretty funny, huh? Painter the Builder. They adopted Kitty and she adored them.” The word was a honeycomb of sarcasm.
“They were the man and woman with the girls in the snapshot your mother kept in the living room? What happened to them?”
“Oh, she could never stop crying about it, even though it happened years before I was born. When the war ended, Painter the Builder wanted to put up a house on a bombed-out street in Birmingham. England, not Alabama. Kitty was at school when the mom and dad and sisters were inspecting the site. A few minutes before Kitty got there an unexploded bomb went off. So that was horrible, looking for her real family, as she always called them, and finding an ambulance and body parts instead.”
She gave her repellent laugh again: her mother had described the scene many times and Judy had grown tired of hearing it. I jammed my hands into my pockets to make sure I didn’t leap up and shake her, but I had to wait a moment before I could trust myself to ask another question.
“I know your mother was difficult to live with, but can you remember that her life was punctuated by horrifying losses?” I said at last. “Losing her birth mother and the grandmother who raised her. Losing the family that adopted her. And losing you to drugs.”
“Don’t you guilt-trip me!” Judy’s eyes flashed. “I heard that morning, noon and night for the last thirty-five years.”