“With a thermos. Tonight we saw one small yellow light about five miles out, and he said, ‘That’s not it, it never is,’ and I said, ‘Dad. Drive to the light.'”
He stood up, a big man in a small room, with his hands open.
“What I came to say, Mrs. Varnum, is this. I understand why you did it. I understood it that night, and I understand it better now. I was angry at you for a while, and I’m not anymore, and I haven’t been for a long time. I’m not saying it was right.
“I’m saying I forgive you. And I’d like you to put it down. You’ve carried it long enough.”
I do not know what I did.
I know I put both hands flat on the counter and then could not hold that, and I came around the end of it, a sixty-six-year-old woman, and sat down on the floor of my own office in my apron, against the front of the counter, and cried.
When I could speak, I said the only thing there was, and I did not say it in any order.
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I said, “Is she alive? The baby?”
The young woman, who had been sitting very straight, made a sound that was half a laugh. “Mrs. Varnum,” she said. “I’m the baby.”
I looked at her. The braid, a long straight nose, and for the first time I saw it. A towel, in the crook of a coat. A little cap too big for her, with a pompom.
“Tilda,” she said. “Matilda Rudd. I’m twenty-one, I’m in nursing school in Hays, and I’ve heard this story about nine hundred times.”
She crouched on the linoleum in front of me and did not touch me. She had the careful distance of someone who has handled a lot of frightened people already.
“I want you to hear this the way it’s meant. I came here to be mad at you.”
“You should be,” I said.
“I’d built a whole person in my head. A hard woman with lipstick and little glasses. I’ve carried my speech in my backpack for three years like a stone.”
She looked around the office, at the crossword and the stained mug and the framed picture of Merle in his cap.
“And then you came out of the kitchen with your hands wet and said, ‘We have eight.'”
“I did not mean to say eight.”
“Dad’s told me since I was ten that there were eight brass tags on the board that night. He counted them while you were lying to him.”
Her eyes were wet, and she smiled a little.
“It’s hard to stay mad at somebody who answers like that. I’m not going to tell you I forgive you. I only have it from his side. But I’ll sit with it. And I’ll tell you what I do know. The first thing you asked me was whether I was alive.”
She had put out her hand, so I took it, in both of mine, and I could feel the pulse in her wrist. I thought, this was the weight in the towel. This was what I weighed.
Dwaine helped me up off the floor as if he had picked up old women off floors before.
I washed my face in the kitchen sink and put the kettle on, because that is what I do, and when I came back I did the one thing I had not known I would do.