“I’ve heard worse in nicer clothes,” my mother said.
Then Portia — who had not looked at me the whole meeting — turned on her father.
“You said the money was FINE.
You told me to throw a three-million-dollar party — you SAID — ”
“Portia — ”
“You let me hum*liate his mother over a DRESS,
in front of everyone, and the whole time YOU were the one who was — ”
“Portia, be QUIET — ”
“Is the house gone, Daddy?
Is the house GONE?”
And Aldous Greaves, in front of his partners and his family and the cleaning woman who’d built his indictment in a spiral notebook, did not answer his daughter, because there was no answer that kept the paint on the wall.
My mother stood up.
In the blue dress.
She did not gloat.
She has never gloated in her life; gloating is what you do when winning is rare, and my mother had been quietly right about everything for sixty years.
“Rafael,” she said.
“We can go.
I’ve seen what I came to see.”
“What did you come to see, Mama?”
She looked at the table — at Portia, at Aldous, at the two hundred-dollar-a-plate collapse of it all.
“I came to see whether being right
