Chapter 13
The eighth-floor restroom at Harris County Family Court was beige, quiet and lit by long fluorescent tubes that highlighted every imperfection on a face.
Aurora was at the second sink, splashing cold water on the insides of her wrists, when the door swung open behind her.
She saw Geraldine Larkin in the mirror before Geraldine saw her.
For one second, in the bare hard light of the bathroom, the two women looked at each other in the glass — a thin Black woman in her late sixties in a navy skirt suit, silver hair pulled severely back, the same pearls she had worn at Cyrus's funeral.
Geraldine's face moved at the corner.
She closed the door behind her without hurry.
"Aurora."
"Mrs. Larkin."
"I had hoped we would have a moment before the proceedings."
Geraldine crossed to the mirror, set her small handbag on the counter, and adjusted one strand of pearls at her throat that had not needed adjusting.
"My granddaughter."
"Maeve’s daughter."
"My granddaughter, Aurora. By blood. We do not pretend, in my family, that paperwork undoes blood."
Aurora dried her hands very slowly on a paper towel.
"Then I am glad your family is not raising her."
Geraldine's eyes moved.
"My dear girl."
"I am not your dear, Mrs. Larkin. I have had this conversation in a different room with a different woman now. Whatever you have come in here to say, say it."
Geraldine inclined her head a quarter inch.
"All right. I will say it plainly. The judge is going to look across her courtroom this morning at a marriage contracted between two people who had not spoken in fifteen years, in apparent satisfaction of the conditions of a will.
She is going to look at a billion-dollar husband whose money has bought you a wedding band and a Pinewood Hollow address.
A housekeeper's daughter from the Third Ward.
Paint on her hands. A maiden name nobody in River Oaks has ever heard.
And she is going to do what any sensible Texas judge would do.
She is going to return my granddaughter to the family she was born into.
I have come in here to suggest, before that happens in public, that you save your dignity and walk out of that courtroom voluntarily.
I will not pursue you afterward. You will not be made a spectacle of.
You can go back to your watercolors. My granddaughter will be raised in the home she was always meant to be raised in. That is the offer."
Aurora set the paper towel down.
She turned from the sink and looked at Geraldine Larkin for the first time.
"Mrs. Larkin. May I ask you a question."
"Go ahead."
"When Imari was three years old, you sat her at a small table by herself at your Christmas dinner because, you said, she was acting up.
The truth was that she had asked to sit beside her mother.
She was three. She wanted her mama. And you decided, in your dining room, in front of countless adults, that the lesson she needed to learn was that asking for her mother was bad manners. Do you remember that Mrs. Larkin?"
Geraldine's mouth moved, very slightly.
"Aurora—"
"Do you remember the comments you made about her hair when she was two.
Within earshot of her. About the texture of it.
About how it would need to be tamed. About what her mother was not doing for her.
I was at that barbecue. I heard them. So did Maeve.
So, I expect, did Imari, who at two was old enough to feel a sentence aimed at her even if she could not yet parse the words. "
"I have never—"
"Do you remember telling my best friend, at her own daughter's first birthday, that she had ruined your son.
In the kitchen, with a glass of white wine in your hand.
Maeve told me that night. She cried into the phone for an hour.
Her daughter was one year old, Mrs. Larkin.
That is the woman you are. That is the home you are asking a Texas family court to send a grieving eight-year-old back into. "
Geraldine did not move.
The fluorescent light hummed.
"So no, Mrs. Larkin. I will not walk out of that courtroom. I am going to walk into it. And every one of those things is going to be in front of that judge this morning, in plain English, because Maeve had written them down in her journal, that’s how much they affected her, and our attorney has copies in the file on his desk. ”
Aurora picked up her own handbag from the counter.
"You are correct about one thing. I am the housekeeper's daughter.
My mother cleaned other people's houses for thirty years so I could go to school.
She is sitting in the front row of that courtroom this morning in pearls that cost forty dollars, and she is the best mother I have ever known.
She raised me to recognize a woman like you the first time I met one.
So did Maeve. So, in the end, did your son.
That is why your name is not in that will. "
She walked past Geraldine to the door.
*****
The Harris County Family Court occupied the eighth floor of the same downtown courthouse where Aurora had signed her name to her own marriage in a paneled judge's chambers two months earlier.
The courtroom they were assigned to that morning was nothing like the small ceremonial space she remembered.
It was bigger. It had a public gallery with three rows of dark wood pews, a long bench, a witness stand, a court reporter at a small machine and state seal mounted on the wall above the judge's chair.
It had Geraldine Larkin in it.
Aurora saw her again the moment she walked through the double doors. Geraldine was sitting at the petitioner's table on the right, her hands folded in front of her on the table.
Her husband, Roderick Larkin, was beside her, gray-suited and silent. He had not spoken in any of the depositions Mason had run them through that week. He was, Mason had told them, a man who let his wife do the speaking.
Crispin Whittaker, the Larkins' attorney, was already at the petitioner's table with two associates. He was the kind of Texas litigator who wore a tan suit to family court so the jury would underestimate him. He had a long deceptively easy smile and very blue eyes.
There was no jury today. There was just the judge.
Halston walked Aurora down the center aisle with his hand at the small of her back, the same way he had walked her into the Wortham two months ago.
She was in a soft black sheath dress with three-quarter sleeves and a single strand of pearls Ayanna had clipped around her neck that morning at the Akande kitchen table, where the entire Akande family had eaten a quiet breakfast together for the first time in three weeks.
Her natural curls were pulled back at the temples and out around her shoulders.
The gold ring was on her left hand. Halston was in a navy suit and matching navy tie. Imari was at home with Yvette.
Errol and Ayanna walked behind them up the aisle, followed by Rhett and Folake, who had stayed in Pinewood Hollow for the entire week leading up to the hearing because she had refused, as she had put it, to be more than forty miles from Aurora until this was over.
They took the front row of the gallery on the left side of the aisle.
Aurora did not look at Geraldine when she passed the petitioner's table.
She did not have to.
She felt Geraldine's eyes on her.
Mason was already at the respondent's table on the left, two associates of his own at his side. He stood up when Aurora and Halston reached him and pulled out Aurora's chair himself. He gave her a small, steady, lawyerly smile.
“Mrs. Iverson.”
“Mason.”
“We are going to be just fine.”
“Tell me again.”
“We are going to be just fine.”
The bailiff called the room to its feet. The judge came in.
Judge Henrietta Pomfret was sixty-one, white, slim, with iron-gray hair pinned at the nape of her neck.
Aurora had read every page of every opinion the woman had written in the last five years.
Mason had had her do it. He had said, you are going to be in her room for six hours of your life so you need to know how her brain works.
Aurora knew. The woman wrote like Halston spoke. Clear. Direct. Without sentiment.
Aurora was glad of her.
“Be seated. Counsel, your appearances.”
Whittaker stood first. “Crispin Whittaker, Whittaker and Brewer, on behalf of petitioners Geraldine and Roderick Larkin.”
“Mason Whitcroft, Whitcroft, Pryce and Hale, on behalf of respondents Halston Iverson and Aurora Iverson.”
Judge Pomfret nodded. She looked down at her papers then back up.
“This is the matter of the custody of the minor child, Imari Larkin, age eight, daughter of the late Maeve and Cyrus Larkin.
The petitioners are the paternal grandparents.
The respondents are the legal guardians under the parents' will, who have entered into a marriage of recent vintage in apparent satisfaction of the will's adoption condition. The petitioners allege that the marriage is fraudulent and the guardianship therefore void. We are here to determine whether that allegation has merit. Counsel for the petitioners, you may proceed.”
Whittaker stood up.
He laid out his case. He brought up the speed of the marriage, Halston's prior broken engagement to the senator's daughter eight years before and the fact that the senator's daughter had publicly stated, in a deposition Mason's team had not been able to suppress, that Halston had ended the engagement abruptly, without apparent cause.