The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

She must have left them there after the last day of the season, when I picked her up from the bus.

She sat there holding them in her lap. She turned them over. She put one on and flexed her fingers, and it still fit, mostly, a little tight across the knuckles because she had grown since summer.

“I wore out four pairs of these,” she said quietly. “One every year. I was so proud of how much money was in that account, Mom. I used to look at it before bed.”

I had to pull over. I mean that. We were back on the interstate by then, and I put on my blinker and pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park, and I put my face in my hands and cried harder than I had cried since my father died.

Avery did not say anything. She just reached over with the hand that still had the glove on it and rubbed my back in little circles, like I used to do for her when she had the flu.

When I could talk, I said, “I’m so sorry, baby. I should have kept it in your name. That was on me.”

“It’s not on you,” she said. “It’s on him. But I don’t hate him, Mom. I tried to. I can’t.” She was quiet a second. “I just want him to say it to me. Not to you. To me.”

She took the glove off and laid both of them on the dashboard, palms down, where she could see them. They rode there the rest of the way to Washington.

“Maryland,” she said, in the evening. “That’s six. Is Washington a state?”

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s its own thing. But you can count it.”

“Seven,” she said.

We got to the motel in northern Virginia a little after nine at night, Eastern time, almost exactly sixteen hours after we left our driveway.

The ice machine did not work. The room smelled like carpet cleaner and somebody else’s cigarettes. Avery said it was the best room she had ever been in.

I texted Kevin from the parking lot. “Here safe.” He wrote back in less than a minute, like he had been sitting there holding the phone. “Thank God. Duke says hi. I’m sorry.”

I did not answer the last part. I was not ready to.

That night, with the air conditioner rattling under the window, Avery lay in the other bed and asked me the thing I had been afraid she would ask.

“What if they think I’m weird for being there? Like, what if they think I’m stalking the class trip?”

“Then we will look at Lincoln,” I said, “and we will read the speech on the wall, and we will go to the Air and Space Museum afterward, and we will have a perfectly good day. You don’t need anybody’s permission to be on those steps, honey. They belong to you as much as anybody.”

We took the train in from Virginia at six forty-five the next morning. It was full of men in suits and women in sneakers carrying their work shoes in bags.

Avery stood holding the pole and looked at every single one of them like they were in a movie.

We got off at Foggy Bottom and walked. It is about twenty minutes from there if you do not know where you are going, which we did not.