“Don’t you worry about that. Buddy came by while you was sleeping, and I let him borrow my car to go out there to tell Lonnie and Ellamae.”

I packed a few clothes and went home with Mama and Daddy. We were all feeling so beaten down when we got up Sunday morning, none of us wanted to go to church. After breakfast, they met with Reverend Jessup and the undertaker to make the arrangements for Odell’s service. I called up some of my coworkers and our principal at their homes and told them I’d be off work indefinitely.

With Odell gone, I was going to manage the store until Daddy and Mama replaced him. But no matter who took over the job, I would do the bookkeeping for the rest of my life. Now that I knew Odell had been embezzling money and stealing merchandise for so long, I dreaded checking the inventory records and going over other paperwork that covered the last five-and-a-half years. I insisted on doing it so my naïve parents wouldn’t have to. Because if they did it and noticed something suspicious, they probably would have come up with every reason in the book not to accuse Odell of any wrongdoing. I was going to do all I could to keep them from finding out the truth.

Odell’s funeral was scheduled to take place on Wednesday. To honor him, Daddy decided to keep the store closed the whole week. Buddy and Sadie balked about that, but when he told them they’d still get their full pay, they calmed down.

Monday morning, people came to the house in droves to offer their condolences. They couldn’t praise Odell enough. Just hearing them talk about how “godly” and what a good “role model” he had been, made me sicker. I shuddered when I thought about how often and long I had praised him myself. Only a couple of folks, both from our church, mentioned Yvonne and Milton and it was only to throw out a few unflattering comments about how they had lived such a wicked lifestyle.

By afternoon, I felt well enough to go back to my house to get some more clothes. When I got there, I was surprised to see the old truck that belonged to Yvonne’s uncle Sherman parked in front of her house. As I was about to unlock my front door, somebody hollered my name. I immediately turned around. It was Yvonne’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Cherie. Her brothers, JJ and Ishmael, born ten months apart, were eleven. They were peeping out the front window. But they didn’t come outside.