Chapter 6

Cori had the day off Friday. I know this the way I know all her days off, which is that I plan my service calls around them.

I found out what she did with it, later, and it went like this.

She called Deb's house in Toledo at eight-thirty and got Deb herself, awake, three hours ahead in the time zone of nothing to do. Deb said Ruth had been there in the spring, March into June, and then she'd told Deb she was going home. Deb said Ruth's mail still comes to Farling - she never changed the address on anything because she said it was too much bother and she'd be back.

Then Cori drove to the village office and asked the clerk for the property record on the cold storage, because her husband's name is on it, and the clerk is Rita Sowle, who has known Cori since Cori was fifteen and bagging at the IGA, and Rita printed it without asking a single question. Registered owner: Ruth M. Hollis. Mailing address: 39 Quarry Street, Farling. Next to it, in the tax rolls, in a column Cori read twice: homestead exemption - owner occupied since 1979. Nothing to be filed for a change of address, because nobody had ever filed one.

Then she went out to the van to get the ice scraper, because it had sleeted overnight, and she opened the passenger door and reached under the seat for the scraper, and her hand closed on a dented stainless thermos.

She's smart. She didn't bring it in and throw it at me. She unscrewed the lid in the driveway and turned it over in the sleet and read R.H. scratched crooked under the lip with an ice pick, and she stood there in the driveway of 39 Quarry Street for a long time.

Then she walked down the alley and knocked on the loading dock.

Ruth let her in.

I have to give my mother this: she didn't lie. She sat on her cot and let Cori look around. The cot. The heater. The Quaker Oats canister. The extension cord. The rust quilt with the zigzag edge. And the other one, the unfinished one, squares of my father's shirts, laid out half-pieced on the card table with the pins still in it, cut for a twin bed.

Ruth answered exactly what she was asked and not one word more.

"You've been here since July."

"Yes."

"Nate knew."

"That is not a question," Ruth said, "so I'm not going to answer it."

"He brought me coffee in bed Tuesday morning," Cori said. "He told me to drive safe. He stood in our kitchen while I said your name in the same sentence as Toledo."

"You'll have to take that up with your husband."

"Tell me what happened that night."

"No," Ruth said, and it wasn't cruel, it was tired. "It isn't mine to tell. That's the whole trouble, Cori. It isn't mine."

Cori walked back up the alley in the sleet and stood in her own kitchen with her coat still on and looked at the overhead light for a while. Then she went upstairs and pulled the duffel out of the hall closet, and she packed Josie's bag: four pairs of pants, six shirts, the dinosaur pajamas, the yellow sock and the blue sock in case they mattered to a six-year-old, the toothbrush, the rabbit-eared book, and the little bag of crayons.

She left it zipped by the front door, where I would see it when I came in.

I saw it when I came in.