Chapter 10

The kinship placement hearing was the last Thursday in January in the county annex, room 2B, which is a low-ceilinged room with a drop tile and a table and a Michigan flag. My mother was not in the room. She was in a bed at Farling Memorial by then, on hospice, with a morphine pump and a window that faced the river, and she had signed the guardianship nomination in her own shaky hand three days before, with a notary and a nurse and everybody's initials in the right boxes, and Wren Delacroix had signed a consent from Reno that a lawyer had mailed her and she had mailed back in a casino parking lot.

I answered every question. That's all I'll say about it, except that I answered them without my mother in the room to answer for me, which was the entire point of my mother's life by then. The theft. The eighty-eight-month gap in my brother's life. The false identification my wife made when she was twenty years old in the rain. What I saw and when I saw it and what I did for sixteen years instead of saying it.

At the end, the referee asked me why I wanted this child in my home, and I said because she has my father's shirts in her quilt and my mother's handwriting on her thermos, and because last Tuesday she asked me for a glass of water without being afraid of me, and because it isn't a favor. It's the only thing left that's mine to do right.

Cori sat two rows back with Josie on her lap. She had finished the twin quilt in December, all the way to the zigzag edge, and it was folded in her lap during the whole hearing, and she handed it to me in the parking lot afterward without saying anything, which was her way of saying one thing at a time.

They placed Bryn with us. Six-month review. And in the first week of November, the county board had tabled the demolition of the cold storage for six months, on account of the code file, the occupancy, the affidavits, and the medical situation, which meant my mother got to die a hundred feet from her own building and look at it out a window, and she did, three times a day, until the sixth of February.

She died on a Thursday, in the afternoon, with Cori on one side of the bed and me on the other, and she was not awake for most of it, and the last thing she said that made sense was to Cori: "Put the good one on her bed."

So we did.

April came hard and muddy, and my brother Dean drove a produce hauler from Sparks, Nevada to Farling, Michigan in thirty-one hours and parked a Freightliner on Quarry Street at seven in the morning and stood in the loading bay of the Hollis & Sons Cold Storage for the first time in sixteen years.

He's forty-one. He's got a beard now and a bad back and hands like our father's. He stood in that bay and looked at the chain and the soaped windows and the wet gravel and didn't say anything for a long time, and I stood next to him and let him have it.

"This is a hell of a thing to keep," he said finally.

"I know."

"She looked good," he said. "In the pictures you sent. Bryn."

"She's got your face."

He laughed, one short one.

I got the stepladder out of the office and unscrewed the yellow bug light from the bracket over the dock, and the bulb was still warm because the Ungers' outlet was still live and the cord was still there, and I put the bulb in my coat pocket. We aren't going to tear it down this year. Maybe not next. There's an idea about a locker and a bait shop in the front, and Dean says he might stay through the summer and see.

At the feed store that week, Ollie Strade said Dean Hollis's name out loud in front of four men and meant it as a man's name, and one of them was the one who'd been telling the story the other way since 2009, and he had the decency to look at his boots.

Cori moved home one room at a time. That's the only way she'd do it and I don't blame her. First she came for supper, and then she started leaving the good coffee in the cupboard, and then in April her boots were by the door in the morning and I didn't say a word about it because I've learned when to keep my mouth shut, and also because by then everything in our house gets said out loud. That's the rule now. Everything gets said out loud, the small stuff and the ugly stuff, on stated facts, and if I don't know something I say I don't know it, and if I do know it I say it before she asks.

Last night I went up to check on the girls and Bryn was asleep in the third bedroom under the quilt with the zigzag edge, and Josie was standing in the doorway in the dinosaur pajamas with one blue sock on and one yellow sock on, looking across the hall at her.

"Daddy," she said. "Does she still watch at night?"

I pulled the door most of the way shut and left it open two inches the way they both like.

"No, bug," I said. "She sleeps inside now."