At six on Wednesday morning I was out front chopping at the walk, which is Benny's job, because I'd been up since three and couldn't stand still. Benny's car pulled in off Thirty-Eighth.
I'd been chopping for twenty minutes. I'd called a man I put in prison and told him what to do, and he'd said yes like a waiter.
It's a brown Grand Marquis older than Owen, with one hubcap. He parked it in his spot by the dumpster like always, and the passenger door opened, and Dolores got out.
She had her purse over her arm and a plastic grocery bag in her other hand, and she came up the walk in her black work shoes, the kind with the thick soles, stepping around the part I hadn't done yet.
"Dolores."
She stopped. She doesn't stop for most people.
"Monday," I said. "The man who bought the popcorn. What did he say to you?"
"Small." She shifted the bag to her other hand. "Paid exact. Said thank you."
"That's all?"
"That's a lot, for here."
"Did you know him? He was on TV. Every channel."
"Same as you. On the TV." She shifted the bag again. "That's all I know about anybody."
She went past me and pulled the door open with her hip and went inside, and the door swung shut behind her on its slow arm.
Benny came up the walk behind her with his thermos. He looked at the walk and then at the shovel and then at me.
"That's my walk," he said.
"I know."
"You want to do the walk, do the walk. You're doing it wrong, though." He held out his hand for the shovel, and I gave it to him. "You salt first. Then you wait."
He started salting. I stood there with my hands in my armpits.
"Benny. If you saw somebody's face one time, in the dark, a long time ago. Would you know it again?"
"Whose face?"
"Anybody's."
"Depends." He threw salt in a fan, left to right, the way he does everything. "One time how long?"
"A few seconds."
He salted the whole walk down to the lot before he answered.
"You remember a face like you remember a song," he said. "You hear it once on the radio, you don't know the words. Ten years later somebody hums it in the wrong key, you still know it." He screwed the cap back on the salt. "Doesn't mean you know who sang it."
He went inside. I stood out there a while longer, with the salt working under my boots and the sky going the color of dishwater over Thirty-Eighth.
\ \ \*
Lou came at one, like he said he would, and I saw the green truck pull into the fire lane and went into the machine room and sat on an upturned bucket with the door shut, listening to Big Sue tick, until Benny came and said he'd gone. I checked the Dunkin' lot across Thirty-Eighth for a tan car about thirty times that afternoon, and it was never there.
\ \ \*
My mother called at three and said she'd made stuffed cabbage and I should bring the boy. She never makes stuffed cabbage on a Wednesday. That's how I knew she'd heard.
We got there at six. Owen ran in with his boots on and got yelled back to the mat, and the house smelled like tomato and cabbage, like every winter of my life. The TV was going in the front room, Wheel of Fortune, nobody watching it. Over it there's a picture of my dad in his work jacket from the locomotive plant, taken the summer before the accident. He was forty. Next to it is Birdie's school picture from sophomore year. She's making a face at the photographer that she thought nobody would notice, and nobody did, except everybody who's ever looked at it since.
My mother stood in the kitchen doorway in her apron and looked at me the way you look over a car somebody's brought back from borrowing it, checking for dents. She didn't hug me. We're not huggers. She took my coat off me and hung it on the hook herself, and patted it flat, and that was as close as we get.
We ate at the kitchen table. Owen talked for both of us.
"And tryouts are Saturday, Grandma, and Coach Cody says I have the build for it. He's on the billboard."
"The boat man," my mother said. "With the sunglasses."
"He's nice," Owen said. "He tapes sticks."
"Was Aunt Birdie on a hockey team?" Owen said, with his mouth full, looking past me through the doorway at the pictures in the front room.
"Your aunt," my mother said, "could not skate to save her life. She could sing, though. She sang in the shower so loud Mrs. Kuzma next door called the house to ask was somebody hurt."
"What did she sing?" Owen said.
"Anything. Commercials. She sang the jingle for the carpet store."
"Can you sing it?" he said.
"No," my mother said, and then she sang it, two lines, off-key, with her fork in the air, and Owen laughed so hard he had to put his milk down. I'd forgotten that jingle. I'd forgotten it existed. I sat there and couldn't eat.
Halfway through, every phone in the house went off at once, the same recording: a lake-effect band coming in tomorrow by noon, early dismissal for all Erie city schools at eleven-thirty.
"Snow day," Owen said. "Half a snow day. That counts."
"I'm working tomorrow," I said. "I can't leave the ice."
"I'll get him," my mother said.
"Mom, it's going to be a band," I said. "You hate driving in a band."
"I'll get him, Eleanor," my mother said. She put her fork down. "I'm not useless."
"I didn't say you were useless," I said.
"You don't have to say it," she said.
Owen looked at her and then at me. He picked up his plate and said he was going to eat in the front room, and nobody told him no.
\ \ \*
She washed. I dried. That's how we've always done it. She runs the water too hot and hands me plates I can barely hold, and I put them in the wrong cupboard, and she moves them.
"He was at the rink," I said. "Monday. He sat down next to Owen in the bleachers."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"It's Erie." She scrubbed a pan that was already clean. "Everybody knows everything by suppertime."
"Then you know he came to my house too. I went down there, Mom. To Cascade. That's where I was going Monday night when I brought Owen."
She stopped scrubbing.
"I knew it wasn't a pipe," she said.
"I couldn't see his face from the truck." I was holding a plate with the towel, around and around, drying a plate that was dry. "Then I got up close, and it was him. Mom, I need you to tell me I'm not crazy. I need somebody to tell me I saw what I saw."
"What I need," she said, "is for you to stop going down there."
"That's not what I asked. Do you think it was him? You. Do you?"
She looked at the window over the sink instead of at me.
"I think it was somebody," she said. "And they told me it was him, and they put him away, and I put it away. That's what I think."
"That's not an answer."
"I know what you asked." She pulled the plug. "There's people for this. Let them. Whatever they want you to sign, you sign it, and you come home, and you stay home, and you let it be over." She dried her hands on her pants. "I'm managing, Eleanor. I've got a friend."
"What friend?"
"Never you mind what friend. I am finally, for the first time in twelve years, managing. And now every time I turn on the TV, there he is."
"You'd had wine," I said.
I don't know where it came from. It was just there, in the kitchen with us.
"That night. You'd had three glasses of wine with Aunt Pat, and Birdie called and said she needed a ride at midnight, and you said, Eleanor, go get your sister, I can't drive like this. You sent me. You gave me the keys."
My mother looked at me. She had the dish towel in both hands.
"I know what I did," she said.
"I was nineteen."
"I know how old you were." Her voice was very quiet. "And where were you, Eleanor? You left this house at nine o'clock to go to Krista's to watch a movie, and you were going to pick your sister up on the way home at twelve. Where were you at twelve?"
"At Krista's," I said. "I told you."
I wasn't at Krista's. I was in the Bayfront marina, on a cabin cruiser that belonged to some boy's father, up on blocks in the boat lot for the winter with a space heater and a generator running, drinking peach schnapps out of a coffee mug. At twenty past twelve I looked at my phone. I have never told my mother that, and I didn't tell her then.
"You were forty minutes late," she said.
"I know."
"You came home at one in the morning. I heard you. I heard the truck out front, and it sat there, and sat there, with the radio going."
I'd sat out there twenty minutes. I'd turned the radio up so I wouldn't have to hear anything else, and then I'd turned it off, and gone in.
"I heard one set of feet on the stairs," my mother said. "One. And I'd had the wine, so I thought, well, she's in the bathroom. She's downstairs getting a pop. And I went back to sleep. And at half past nine in the morning I went in to get her up for her shift at the bakery and her bed was flat. Nobody had been in it." She folded the dish towel in half, and in half again. "And you didn't say one word. Not at half past nine. Not when the police came at noon. You didn't say one word about any man until four o'clock in the afternoon, after they'd found her."
"I didn't think," I said. "I didn't think it was anything. She gave me the finger. She was fine. I thought she was fine."
"I know you did."
"And now I don't know." I put the plate down on the counter before I dropped it. "What if I was wrong, Mom? What if I got it wrong in that room, and he did twelve years because of me? Then it's twice. Then I didn't just leave her there, I put the wrong man away for it, and the right one's been walking around this whole time, and that's me too, that's mine—"
"You were late," my mother said. "Don't you make it about you twice."
She said it to the window over the sink. Her own face was in it, and mine behind her, and the dark yard.
I put the towel down on the counter. I folded it in half, and in half again, because that's how towels go in this house, and I set it next to the drainer, square to the edge, and I stood there with my hands flat on either side of it.
In the front room somebody was buying a vowel, and the audience was clapping. Owen laughed at something. He has the loudest laugh. It goes through walls.
\ \ \*
I got my keys out of my coat on the hook. I didn't put the coat on. I went out the front door past Owen on the couch with his plate on his knees, and he said, "Mom?" and I didn't stop.
The truck was at the curb. I got in and threw it in reverse without looking, and the tires spun and caught, and I shot backwards into the street, and a car coming down West Eighteenth leaned on its horn and went around me. I didn't look at the house. I drove to the corner and turned right without signaling and kept going.
I got to the end of the block and turned right again. Then right again, onto the street behind my mother's, the one with the church and the bar and an inflatable snowman lying on its face in the snow. The heater blew cold. I had no coat. My hands were so cold on the wheel I couldn't feel where they stopped and the wheel started, and the wipers were going even though it wasn't snowing, because I'd hit them with my knee getting in and didn't know how to make them stop. I was crying with my mouth open, like you only cry in a car, where nobody can hear you.
I always come back around. I just come back mad.
I turned right again, and I was on West Eighteenth again, coming back the way I'd gone, and there was my mother's house with every light on.
Owen was standing on the porch in the snow in his socks. He didn't have his boots on. He had his coat on over his T-shirt, and he was holding his hood shut under his chin with both hands, and he was looking down the street at the corner where I'd turned, the one I'd left by.