Chapter 8

Sunday afternoon Ruth Hollis walked from the cold storage to the Farling Drug parking lot without her liner in her coat and without her pain pills since Saturday morning, and she stood in front of Cori's car until Cori came out with her keys in her hand, and then she said, "I need to say a thing to you," and went down onto the wet asphalt with one hand on the fender.

I got there behind the ambulance. They took her the twelve minutes up Memorial Drive with the lights on and Cori followed in her car, and I followed Cori.

They parked her in the ER hallway on a gurney for two hours because there was no bed upstairs. That hallway is fluorescent and there is a smell of hand sanitizer and it is the loneliest place in the county. Ruth was lucid and gray and had an IV in the back of her hand and she watched the clock over the nurse's station like a woman watching a train.

She timed it. I know she timed it. Later, a nurse told Cori that the patient had refused a dose at three o'clock and asked for it at four-fifteen, and I have thought about that a great deal.

At four-ten, when the hallway was empty except for the two of us and the hum of the ice machine, my mother turned her head on the pillow and said:

"Cori. Sit down and I'll say what I've got to say before they come back with the morphine, because after that I'll be asleep and I won't get another window."

Cori sat on the end of the gurney.

"Nine-twelve, two thousand nine, Harvest Fair Saturday," Ruth said. "You counted thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars at the auction desk and you put it in the safe and you gave my husband the key. That's right, isn't it."

"That's right."

"The next morning the safe was empty. You said you'd seen a man in the office window and it looked like Dean, and Gerald Hollis let you say it and never corrected you once, not that day and not in sixteen years." Ruth's eyes were on the ceiling tiles. "It was not Dean. It was never Dean. It was Gerald, and he took that money out the back door at five past one in the morning and put it in the truck bed under the tarp, and he drove it to Ollie Strade's house before church and paid off a balloon note on this building that was going to eat the house and everything in it, and he left his wedding band in Ollie's drawer as a receipt because Ollie wouldn't take a personal check on the Lord's Day."

Cori didn't move. The ice machine hummed.

"I was awake when he came back in," Ruth said. "His boots were wet. He got in bed and he didn't say anything and neither did I, because I did the math in about a minute and I could either keep my house or keep my son's name, and I picked the house. So that's mine. That's on me and I'll take it with me." She swallowed. "And that's not the part that's yours."

"Ruth."

"Nate was in the alley." My mother turned her head and looked at Cori and she said it slow so there was no way to hear it wrong. "Nate was twenty-two and he couldn't sleep and he went out to lock the dock, and he stood at the side door of this house and watched his father carry that box to the truck. And his father looked right at him and said go in the house, and he went in the house. And the next morning he watched you say it looked like Dean, and he drank his coffee and he said nothing. He has said nothing for sixteen years, Corinne. He let you carry that. He let you carry it in this town with his ring on your finger."

The hallway doors whooshed.

Cori sat very still on the end of that gurney with her hands in her lap, and I watched it land on her, one piece at a time, in the order they happened, the way Josie tells things.

Then she stood up and turned around. Her face was wet and her voice was as flat and level as a tabletop.

"You let her say it for you," she said. "You knew she was dying. You knew she'd do it, and you let her walk here in the rain and stand in a parking lot for a stranger to say the one sentence that's been yours to say since you were twenty-two years old." She took a breath. "The only one you protected was you."

Then she walked out past me down the hall, and her boots made a sound on that floor that I will hear for the rest of my life.