The Halloway admission record — correct, legal, and never disclosed to the patient’s only child.
And then, because a judge is allowed to hear the whole thing once, the recording.
Eleven minutes.
The courtroom listened to my stepbrother move money.
And at minute seven, in a room of forty people, everybody heard a woman’s voice say:
“Royce, the boy’s going to see it.
Give it to Clayton to sign and tell him it’s the insurance.”
Vonetta stood up before her own attorney could get a hand on her.
“That is out of context — that’s my HUSBAND’S house, I nursed that man — ”
“Ma’am, sit down,” said Judge Odalys Vireo.
“I gave that man four years — ”
“Mrs. Kemp.”
“He’d be in a state home if it wasn’t for me!
Ask anybody!
Ask his sister!”
And my aunt Delphine, in the third row, in the good coat she wears to church, stood up and said, “Vonetta, I asked at the front desk on Friday.
Fourteen months.
You’re the only name in that book.”
The deputies were moving by then.
Vonetta went for the aisle — not at me; I want to be accurate, she was going for the door and they were between her and it — and she was shouting, and one deputy got an arm across and the other took her elbow, and she screamed one sentence over the top of all of it, at the back of my head.
