I Was Paid to Pretend to Be His Granddaughter — Then His Final Wish Shocked His Family
His voice was thin by then, and he mostly held my hand, and near the end of the tape there’s a long silence with only the street in it, and then his voice, very quiet, and I had forgotten he’d said it.
“Baby girl, whoever you are — and I’ve always known — you gave an old man something to wait for.
When Kiara comes back, you tell her that.
Tell her I never once stopped listening for her car.
And tell her I heard the other one, too.
The one that came.”
Kiara stopped the tape.
We sat on the porch for a long time.
Then she took off the watch — Loretta’s watch, the one that ticks as steady as he did — and she put it in my hand, and closed my fingers over it.
“Sundays,” she said.
“Kiara, no. It’s yours. It’s in the will—”
“It’s in the will that it comes to me. It doesn’t say what I do with it after. Wear it on Sundays. I’ll wear it the rest of the week. That’s the arrangement, and he’d have liked it, and you know he’d have liked it.”
I wear it on Sundays.
The last thing I want to tell you is about the ramp.
The badly built one.
