Chapter 4

Wednesday I left the shop at four with the van smelling like Freon, and I didn't go home. I drove down Quarry and parked in front of the building my father put up in 1979, and I sat there with the wipers going until I couldn't stand it and got out.

The office door on the side is the old steel one with the dent where Dean backed the truck into it in 2006. It was unlocked.

Inside, the first thing that hit me was heat. The office has a space heater running and a camp cot along the far wall with an old quilt on it, rust-red and gray, pieced from squares of flannel. I know that quilt. I watched my mother cut it out of my father's work shirts on the kitchen floor the winter after he died, and I know the zigzag edge she sews, because she's made eleven of them and every one has it.

There was a card table. A hot plate. A coffee canister of Quaker Oats. A five-gallon bucket of water with a lid. A cord running out through a hole in the sill, up and over the gravel toward the Ungers' garage.

The ledgers from the business were stacked neat on the desk. Somebody had dusted them.

"You always did leave the door open behind you."

She came up the stairs from the loading dock with a grocery sack in one arm, sixty-six years old, white hair pinned up, wearing my father's flannel under a green canvas coat that used to hang in the mudroom at 39 Quarry. Behind her, in the doorway, stood a girl in a red raincoat two sizes too big, hood down, dark hair that had been braided by somebody who knew what she was doing.

"Hi, Uncle Nate," the girl said.

I have a niece. I have had a niece for eight years and she has been standing thirty-two feet from my kitchen sink for three months.

"Ruth," I said.

"Don't start." She set the sack down and took off the coat and hung it on a nail, and I saw how thin her wrists were. "You've had sixteen years of Tuesdays, Nathan. I don't have that many."

"What does that mean."

"Sit down and I'll tell you what it means."

I didn't sit down. She sat. She sat on the cot with the quilt folded behind her and she looked up at me and I have never in my life been looked at like that by anybody but my mother.

"Pancreatic," she said. "I got the diagnosis in May, two weeks after I sold you the house. The doctor in Grand Rapids gives me February, if I'm lucky and don't do anything stupid, which I have been doing."

"Ma."

"There's a hearing on this building in three weeks. I read about it in the Courier at the library like everybody else. Which means the county gets a key and finds a cot and a child, and then a caseworker drives down from Grand Rapids and takes Bryn to a foster home in a county where she doesn't know a soul." She crossed her ankles. "I have no standing. I'm the dead father's mother. Wren is her mother and Wren has signed nothing and answered nothing since July, and the law does not care what an old woman in a dead building wants."

"So what do you want from me?"

"Bryn has a bed in your third bedroom," my mother said. "You have a house with a mortgage and a furnace that works and a wife who works at the drugstore and is on the school board. There's not a judge in this county who wouldn't place that child with you, Nathan. There is one thing standing in the way of it, and it is standing behind your face right now."

Behind her, the girl had come up the last stair and was standing in the doorway with the second quilt in her arms. It was half-finished, still on the needles in places, squares of my father's shirts and squares of gray sweatshirt, and I knew before I looked at the size that it was cut for a twin bed. For the twin bed in my third bedroom, the room Cori has been calling the office for three years.

"Twenty-four hours," Ruth said. "Tomorrow at six o'clock I want to hear you say out loud, in front of somebody who isn't me, what happened in that alley on September twelfth, two thousand nine. Or I'll do it myself, in front of the county and the church and whoever from the Courier bothers to show up, and I will not be kind about it, and your standing in this town will be a memory."

"You'd do that to Cori."

"I'd do that for Cori." My mother's eyes were wet and her voice wasn't. "That girl has been carrying a sentence she said when she was twenty for sixteen years. You let her carry it."

The little one stepped out of the doorway and looked up at me. She's small for eight, with my brother's long face and my mother's flat gray eyes, and she looked at me for a long minute, the way grown-ups don't have the nerve to.

"You're the one who was there," Bryn said.