Chapter 8

Pinewood Rest, Sunday morning, seven o'clock. My mother hadn't eaten a real meal since April.

Her room is at the end of the west hall with a window facing the parking lot, which meant for two weeks she'd been watching the Ottaway pickup come and go.

She was in the chair by the window. Oxygen at two liters. She's sixty-three and looks eighty and her hands are still beautiful, which I hate.

"I'm not going to beg you for this," I said.

"Then what are you doing here."

"Getting it out loud."

She looked out the window. The Ottaway truck was there. It was there every day.

"You know what he said to me?" she said. "Odell. In the porch chair. He said, 'Nobody's accusing you of anything. We're only asking you to be practical.'" She breathed. It cost her something to breathe. "Sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars. To the institute. Direct. Not a check to me. I couldn't have stolen a nickel off it if I'd wanted. He said, 'You can keep the girl. You cannot keep both.'"

"You signed."

"I signed in the kitchen on Water Street with Faye standing behind me holding a bag of groceries and a bowl of applesauce for you because you couldn't hold a spoon." She turned her head. "You had twenty-two staples in your arm and you ate applesauce with your left hand and watched cartoons with the sound off."

I made myself stand in the doorway. If I sat on the bed I was going to lose it.

"Where's the original."

"In my Bible."

"Is it in the Bible because you're sorry or because nobody would look there?"

Marge almost smiled. It was a terrible thing to see.

"Because nobody would look there."

She sent me to the drawer under the nightstand and I found it under a zippered cover, between Ecclesiastes and the maps, and I pulled out a legal-size envelope that had been opened and closed so many times the flap was soft as cloth. Inside was the release - the original, the real thing, with a notary's embossed seal I had to tilt to the light to see - and clipped to the back of it with an old metal paperclip, a second document.

An invoice. Three Rivers Burn Institute, Pittsburgh. Patient: Willa R. Keene, age 6. Burn and reconstructive care, six weeks inpatient, skin grafting, physical therapy, twenty-four scheduled follow-ups.

PAID IN FULL, $61,400.00. Stamped. Dated October 1994.

Somebody had written in the margin in pen, small, in my mother's handwriting: Exhibit B.

Exhibit B. She'd labeled it. Thirty years ago, with a dying house and a small daughter and nothing left, Marjorie Keene had sat down and labeled the receipt for her daughter's arm like it was a court paper, because it was a court paper. Somebody had told her to keep it. Somebody had been planning for the day somebody asked.

"Do you know what that is?" she said.

"It's the bill."

"It's what you cost," my mother said. "I kept it because Odell said if I ever needed it in front of a judge I'd want it. And because I wanted to look at it. Every couple of years. To remind myself I got something."

"You didn't get something." My voice came out shredded. "You sold something, and the thing you bought was me, and nobody asked me if I wanted to be bought."

"Don't." Her oxygen line moved. "Don't tell me what I could have done. I was thirty-two years old with no car and a daughter who couldn't open her hand."

"So was I supposed to know? Was I supposed to grow up thinking I was the only reason my mother was alone?"

"You were supposed to live."

"You were supposed to tell me!"

The nurse's cart went past in the hall. My mother shut her eyes and breathed for a while, and when she opened them she looked straight at me, and I understood she had been working up to this the whole time.

"Willa. He doesn't need to know all of it."

"He already knows most of it."

"He doesn't know the money went to your arm." She waited. "Let me die with that. He can have the family he had, he can have his boy, he can hate the company. But let him think I signed him away because I was weak, or because he was the easier one. Let it be me."

"You want me to stand in front of him and lie about what my own arm cost."

"I want you to have a brother who can stand to look at you."

And that was the moment, right there, with the oxygen hissing and the Ottaway truck in the lot - that was when I knew what I was going to do, because she'd finally told me what the whole thirty years had actually been for. It wasn't for keeping us apart. It was for keeping us both looking at her instead of at each other.

"No," I said.

She closed her eyes.

"I'm not going to lie for you, and I'm not going to tell him for you either. I'll stand next to him when he finds out. That's the last thing I'll ever do for you, and it's not for you."

Then I picked up my bag and went out to the desk and signed the care paperwork. Everything. Do-not-resuscitate, the comfort-care order, palliative, all of it, because I was the next of kin and there was nobody else in the world who would. The aide gave me a pen from a cup. I signed my name three times on a clipboard with a picture of a sunrise on it.

I didn't cry until the second turn on Route 19, and then I had to pull over because I couldn't see the road.