When the bed was together, Piper took a sandwich bag out of her pocket. Inside were forty-one glow-in-the-dark stars. She had peeled every one off her ceiling at Curt’s that week, one at a time.
“Can you reach?” she asked him.
He got the step stool. He stuck every star where she pointed.
That night, after the others had gone, he and I sat on the front step of the four-plex with two cans of root beer.
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“I was ashamed,” I said. I could not look at him. “Thirty-eight years old, living in my brother’s spare room, and Pam looked at me like I was a girl who still lived at home. I wanted one thing in my life that looked like I had it together. And what I did was make you small to get it.”
“I know.”
“I’ll fix it, Curt. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. I’m sorry.”
“Then do it,” he said. “Here’s what happens now.”
He told me Tuesdays and Thursdays he would still get Piper from school, and if I wanted more than that, I would ask him, as her uncle, and he would say yes or no. Not as a favor I did not have to name. He said he had never held me to the six months either, that he had liked a full house, that we had both let it drift. I had not expected that last part, and it undid something in my chest that the apology had not.
“And she heard you, Janelle. She was right there at the rail.”
I put my face in my hands. I had not known she heard. I have thought about that a good deal, and it doesn’t change anything. I had known it was possible, and I had said it anyway.
“I’m going to pay you back,” I said, after a while.
“With what?”
“A hundred dollars on the first of every month. For as long as it takes.”
“That’s fifty years.”
“Then I’ll be old,” I said. “And I’ll still be paying.”
He said he would put every dollar in an account at Wellfield State Bank in Piper’s name. Then he drove home to his quiet house. He did not hug me. That came later, and it was not that night.
I almost told him about the ring. I had the words in my mouth. But I looked at his face in the porch light of a four-plex he had paid for and decided it was the one gift he had never let me thank him for, and that I would find another way.