Chapter 6

Pinewood Rest won't let you in after seven unless you're dying, and I'm not dying, so I sat in my flatbed in the lot in the rain and watched the two men in the Ottaway truck watch the door.

At eight-forty an aide came out in a rain jacket and told me my mother had said she didn't want to see me.

"She said that?"

"She said she's tired and she's already seen you this week." The aide was nineteen and hated her job a little. "She said come Sunday."

I called the room phone. It rang eleven times.

"She's not answering."

"She took the phone off the hook," the aide said. "I'm sorry. She does that."

I sat there two more hours.

That's what I want on the record about the night I found out my mother was a coward, because I've been called a lot of things since, and ungrateful is the one that stuck: I sat in a flooded parking lot for two hours with the motor off, in the dark, with two of the Ottaways' men thirty yards away drinking coffee, waiting for a woman to want to see me.

At ten-forty, Faye came out carrying a manila envelope.

She got in the passenger side and shut the door and she didn't look at me. She had her coat buttoned wrong. She put the envelope on the seat between us and kept both hands on it.

"He called her in ninety-four," she said. "The lawyer. Odell. He had the release in one hand and a letter in the other one and he read it to her on the porch at Water Street while I was standing there holding a bag of groceries."

"Read what."

Faye slid the envelope over.

It was one page. Ottaway Fuel & Grain letterhead, dated September 6, 1994, eight days before the release. Typewritten. A copy of a copy, gray and soft at the edges, with a paperclip shadow at the top.

It says: Ms. Keene, our client is prepared to be generous. However, if you pursue a claim for the March fire, the county will be compelled to review your living situation, your income, your medical history, and the condition of the house at Coon Hollow Road, and you cannot be assured of keeping custody of either child.

I read it twice and I couldn't get past either.

Faye kept talking because the silence was worse.

"You'd been in the burn unit six weeks. You were six years old and you couldn't open your hand. The house was condemned in July. There was no insurance money because your father had let the policy lapse before he left. Your mother had no income at all, no job, no driver's license, and a sister married to a man with a mortgage. They came to her with a piece of paper and a number and they said the number was the surgery. That's the part nobody understands. It wasn't cash in an envelope. It was the surgery. Three Rivers wouldn't touch you without payment up front."

"She signed her son away for my arm."

"She signed her son away to keep you," Faye said. "She signed him away to keep you, and they told her if she talked she'd lose you too."

The rain came down on the flatbed's roof and I could hear the truck's engine tick like it always does, and thirty yards away two men in an Ottaway pickup turned their headlights on at the same time, which was not a coincidence.

I made myself read the last line.

I want to say it plainly. No softening.

"You can keep the girl. You cannot keep both."

Faye cried then, finally, in the passenger seat of my dead truck, and I sat next to her and felt pity come up in me like water in a basement, ugly and unstoppable, and right behind it, so close they were the same feeling, a fury so big I couldn't get my hands around it.

"She could have told me," I said.

"She'd have lost you."

"She could have told me anyway."

Faye wiped her face. "That's what I said. In ninety-six. I said it once, and she looked at me and said, 'And then what does she do with it, Faye? She's eight.'" Faye folded the letter back into the envelope with hands that wouldn't do what she told them. "And I didn't have an answer. So I shut up for twenty-eight years. Don't look at me like that. I know what it costs."

I put the truck in gear.

"Where are you going?"

"Over the ridge," I said. "Because in the morning I'm going to go stand outside that window until somebody opens it."