Chapter 3

I left twenty minutes early on Friday to get the bus, and then I kept driving past the end of the lane and pulled the truck off on the wide spot by the old mailbox post where the county bus stops, and I sat there with the heat on and the engine off because the heat was broken anyway.

Nora came out in her blue hoodie with her hood up and her backpack on and she stopped when she saw me in the truck instead of on the porch.

I opened the passenger door. "Get in."

She got in and put the backpack between her feet and sat looking straight ahead with her hands on her knees.

I said, "I want to tell you something and I don't want you to say anything back until I'm done."

She nodded.

"After your dad died I wasn't right for a while. You were three. I couldn't get out of the bed some days. I couldn't pay the propane. I left you with Miss Charlene for six weeks while I got my feet under me." I had my hands on the wheel. "And one day I got in this truck and I drove out to her house and I sat outside in the road for two nights before I had it in me to knock on the door and take you home. Two nights, in March, in this truck. Because I was scared you wouldn't want to come."

She didn't move.

"I came back for you," I said. "That's the whole story. I came back. I've never once not come back."

The bus was coming down Route 7, a long way off, headlights in the fog.

Nora turned and looked at me, and her face cracked, not into crying, into something narrower and stranger. She said, "You came back for me?"

"Yes."

She looked out the windshield at that bus for a second, and then she said, "Eleven."

"Eleven what."

"Months," she said. "It's eleven. Since March."

The bus pulled up and stopped and cranked its door open, and my daughter sat there with her hand on the door handle and said, "I take his things. The belt, the hose off the wall, the yardstick out of the scale house, his cellar key. That way he has to go looking for them before he can start, and looking takes a while, and sometimes he gives up." She said it fast, the way you recite something you've rehearsed in the dark. "I keep them. I don't know why I keep them. I just do."

I couldn't get any air.

"Don't say anything today," she said. "Not today. Saturday there's a lot of trucks. There's more people on Saturday." She wiped her nose with her wrist where the red rubber band was. "He said we have an appointment Monday. Ten o'clock. He said after that nobody can make me leave."

And she got on the bus.

I sat there in the cold with the engine off for twenty minutes before I could make my hands start the truck.