My mother called at seven to say she had a migraine, and I couldn't say one word against it, because it was the seventh of February.
"You don't get migraines," I said anyway.
"I get them now." Her voice was thick and slow, like she was talking through a scarf. "I'm lying down with a cloth on my eyes, Eleanor. I can't have a child on me today."
"He doesn't climb on you. He talks."
"That's worse."
Behind her a kettle was coming up to a boil, that long rising note.
"You're up," I said.
"I'm up to put the kettle on. I'm allowed a cup of tea. I'm hanging up before I'm sick."
She hung up. I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand and the stove clock saying seven-oh-four. I'd had her down for Owen since Thursday, the way you have a bridge down for getting across a creek. Now there was a creek.
At ten to eight I called Benny from the truck. He picked up with a machine running behind him and had to say "What?" twice.
"I need somebody for Owen. All day."
"Where?" Benny said.
"The rink?"
"I've got your ice, Nell. I've got your ice and twenty Squirts and Hartzell with a whistle. You crossed that boy off the list with a marker. You want your kid doing long division ten feet from Hartzell? Who's watching him? Me? I'm on the machine."
"Okay."
"Okay you'll find somebody, or okay you're hanging up?"
"Both," I said.
I had four numbers in my phone that would take a nine-year-old for a day without asking me why. One was my mother and one was Benny. One was Tasha Greer, who'd worked a double and wouldn't be a person before one o'clock. The fourth was filed under SNACKS.
Dolores and I hadn't said a word since I'd slapped her counter glass, and we're not people who do. Dolores was Dolores. She docked my son's pretzels for eraser holes. She'd never once lied to him about the price.
I made a deal on the front walk at nine-fifteen. If she picked up before the fifth ring, I was doing the right thing. It rang nine times. I stood there with the cold coming up through my boots, and on the ninth she said, "Yeah."
"It's Nell Dorsey."
Nothing. It went on long enough that I looked at the screen to see if the call had dropped.
"I need somebody for Owen today. Just till dark. I'll pay whatever you say."
"I don't want your money."
"Dolores."
"I heard you." A cabinet shut on her end. "Till dark. He eats what I make. Ten o'clock, I'm not dressed."
She hung up. I stood on the walk with the phone in my hand like I'd won something and wasn't sure what.
Inside, Owen was at the table in his pajama top and yesterday's hockey socks, working a piece of toast down to one last bite so he'd have something to argue with.
"Get dressed. You're going to Dolores's."
"Dolores has a house?"
"An apartment. Over a laundromat."
"Is this about tryouts? Because tryouts were at eight and we missed them, and you said that was your decision, so it's not my fault."
"It's a rule," I said. "Not a deal."
"Then I'm allowed to be mad."
"Be mad in the truck."
He was, for eleven blocks.
\ \ \*
She lives on West Twenty-Sixth over a laundromat with a steamed-up window and a sign that says SUDS with the middle light burned out. There's a steel door beside it with a buzzer. I didn't have to use it. She came down and opened it herself with the chain still swinging, in her black work shoes and a gray cardigan buttoned one hole off, and she looked at Owen first and me second, like checking which of us was the delivery.
I had a grocery bag with his math folder and a sandwich in it. She looked at the bag the way she looks at a returned pretzel.
"I have food," she said.
"It's just his homework," I said.
"Then give him the homework," Dolores said.
"Up," she said, to Owen. "Boots on the mat."
"They are on the mat," Owen said.
"Then wipe them," Dolores said.
The stairs smelled like Pine-Sol. The apartment smelled like Pine-Sol and fryer oil, which is how she smells at work, and I'd never once thought about her smelling like that anywhere else. Two rooms and a kitchen. Everything wiped and put back where it lived, like a kitchen after close. A couch with a blanket folded in thirds. A TV the size of a bread box, off. On top of it, in a drugstore frame, a boy a little older than Owen in a Glenwood league jersey two sizes too big, holding a stick like a shovel.
"That's our rink," Owen said. "Who's that?"
"Mike," Dolores said. "Pittsburgh now."
She said it the way she says the price of coffee. Owen looked at the boy and then at her, and for once in his life he had nothing, and then he had something.
"Do you have cable?" Owen said.
"I have rules," Dolores said.
"What are they?" Owen said.
"One. You eat what I make. Two. You don't touch the stove. Three, nobody opens that door, I don't care who's knocking," she said.
"Can I see them written down?" he said.
"No," said Dolores.
"Then technically they're not rules," Owen said.
"Then technically, Mister, you can sit on the stairs," she said.
He thought it over. "Okay," he said. "What's for lunch?"
"What I make," Dolores said.
"Is it a pretzel?" he said.
"It's what I make," Dolores said. "Pretzels are earned."
He looked at me then, over the top of her cardigan, with his coat still half zipped, and I saw him decide to be brave about it. He gets that from nobody. I'd told him it was a work thing and that I'd be back, and he'd believed me, out of respect for the arrangement.
"Dolores," I said. "Thank you, I—"
"Dark," she said.
Out front I had to climb the plow ridge to get to my truck. A gray Taurus sat at the curb with snow packed up to its door handles, a week of it, with a crust on top like a pie lid, and I put my hand on its roof to steady myself and took it off again because it was freezing.
\ \ \*
The park-and-ride is a lot off Interstate Ninety where nobody parks and nobody rides, a flat gray field with a salt shed at one end and a light pole at the other. He'd put the Grand Prix in the far corner, nose out, the exhaust standing straight up in the cold. I left the Ranger between two minivans that looked like they'd been there since Christmas, and I walked across.
He'd slept in it. You could see where. The windows had a skin of frost on the inside, and a gray blanket sat folded square on the back seat, and a toothbrush stood in the cup holder like a flag. On the dash was a thermos with a strip of masking tape across it, printed in capitals: COFFEE. He hadn't shaved. The rims of his eyes were pink.
I knew what I was doing, and I'd say so if anybody asked. A judge had signed a paper at noon on Friday with his name on it, and Kovach had sat across from me in a warm room and told me what it's called when you help a man stay out of their way. I'd driven over here with that word riding on the seat next to me, and I'd come anyway, because he'd said Saturday, and by Monday he'd be in a cell, and I would never know what it was.
I opened his door. He rolled the window down, which was stupid, because I'd just opened the door.
"Good morning, Nell. If I may—"
"Slide over."
"I would rather drive. They have this plate. I know where the troopers sit."
"Then you can tell me."
He looked at my hand, which was out flat between us. Then he took the key out of the ignition and laid it in my palm, with the little brass one that goes to the motel room he wasn't sleeping in, and climbed across the console in two careful moves with his knees up under his chin. It took a while. Neither of us said a word.
The black binder clip was back on the console lid, clamped square to the edge. I didn't look at it. My feet were numb before the ramp.
"Who sold you this thing?"
"My cousin Dale, in Corry. Four hundred dollars. He did not ask me anything."
"Does he know about today?"
"He knows I need a car."
"Where," I said.
He looked straight ahead through the one clear patch of glass. I took Route Five east along the lake, past the gas stations and the dead roadside stands. Out past the guardrail the water had frozen in plates and tilted up on each other, gray on gray, all the way to a horizon you couldn't find. He gave me turns in numbers of miles and said nothing else, and I let him, because I had the keys. Harborcreek went by. A closed Dairy Queen. Ten miles after I'd asked, he said it to the windshield.
"North East."
"It's on your card."
"I know," he said. "You put it back crooked."
I drove another quarter mile without saying anything. The heater rattled at the glass.
"You had that paper in your glove box on the twenty-second," I said. "Four days before the letter. You had the whole thing typed up with my name on it."
"Yes."
"So the letter was a trick."
"The letter was a door," he said. "I needed you to come through it. I did not know another way to ask a woman who had every reason to say no."
"That's what a trick is."
"Then it was a trick." He didn't argue it. "You may turn around. I would not stop you. I could not."
I thought about it for six more miles. I didn't turn around.
\ \ \*
Out past the town the hills open up and it's all vineyards, rows and rows of bare gray vines tied to black wire, running down toward the lake like somebody ruled the land with a pencil. A water tower. A church with a sign out front for the first fish fry of Lent, two weeks early. The sky was that hard clean blue you only get when it's ten above.
"Hammond Road," he said. "Do not slow."
I slowed.
"Do not stop."
"I'm not stopping. I'm driving, Garrett."
A white farmhouse sat on the right with a pickup in the yard, and across from it, set back between two vine rows at the end of a gravel lane with a chain across it, a long gray pole barn with a rust-streaked roof. No sign. A mailbox at the mouth of the lane with no name on it, only a number peeling off the post. I looked at all of it for about as long as it takes to read a stop sign, and then it was behind us.
"Is your son safe?" he said.
"He's with somebody."
"May I ask who?"
"No."
"All right."
He had me go on to the winery and turn around, and then to the lake road and back, in a long loop past a Sheetz and a feed store and a closed-up fruit stand. Coming over a rise on Route Twenty a state police car came the other way, white with the gold stripe, and I put both hands on the wheel like a driving test and looked at nothing. Garrett didn't turn his head. He sat there with his eyes down on the dash, a man making himself into a coat on a seat. The car went by at fifty-five and its driver was drinking something out of a paper cup. I didn't breathe again until the mile marker.
At eleven-twenty he said, "Now," and I took Hammond Road again. The pickup was still in the yard. Snow on the hood, a line of exhaust standing up from the tailpipe.
"He leaves at noon," Garrett said.
"Who?"
"The man across the road. He drives to his daughter's over the Ohio line on Saturdays. He is back by four. I watched him go the Saturday before last." He had both hands on his knees. "It is eleven twenty-one. We will wait."
"For what? What's in the barn?"
"I would like to show you."
"I'd like you to tell me."
"If I tell you, it is my word. I need it to be yours."
"You need a lot," I said, and I put my foot down, and the farmhouse and the barn and the pickup went by in the mirror. I took Route Twenty with no idea where I was going, because it was something to do with my hands.
"Where did you sleep?" I said. "Last night."
"Here. The lot behind the Sheetz, with the engine off after midnight. Thursday also." He said it like the weather. "I have been watching the lane. Nobody has come. Nobody goes in."
"Two nights you've been sitting out here looking at a barn."
"Yes."
"And you wanted me on the one day I couldn't get a sitter."
"I wanted you on the day he leaves," Garrett said. "That is the only day."
The vines went by on both sides, black wire and snow. A tractor lane. A mile marker. The Grand Prix rattled on its bad struts, and every bump I felt in my back teeth.
"Say something," I said.
"What would you like me to say?"
"Anything that isn't a time."
He considered that. "It is eleven thirty-four."
I laughed. I didn't want to. It came out of me like a cough.
"You know what I've got?" I said. I wasn't looking at him. I was looking at the center line. "Twelve years of it. I've got the light and the snow coming sideways and the coat. I've got her finger up. And every time I get to her face I can't make it hold still. I turned around and she'd seen it was me, and her face did something. I've had twelve years to decide what. Some days she's laughing. Some days she isn't."
I said it to the road. I'd never said it out loud to anybody, not Kovach, not Lou, not the lawyer at the trial who asked me four different ways. I let it out of the car window like a cigarette.
He didn't say anything for a quarter mile. A crow went up from a vine row and came down again. When I finally looked over, he had one hand flat on the dash, fingers spread, pressing, like the car was moving too fast. It was the first thing I'd seen him do all week that he hadn't labeled.
"She was laughing," he said.