Chapter 2

Georgia stood alone in the middle of the gate road with the red cap in her fist. The boy was already gone into the black trees above the tracks. The sleet kept falling like nothing had happened. The handcart lay on its side in the gravel, cans scattered everywhere.

Then Wendell found his voice. "I don't know what you think you saw, lady." "Half this town has a mark like that." "No," Georgia said. "They don't." Wendell scooped up his clipboard. "That kid's a runaway. The county's got a file on him." "Then you've read it." "Close enough." He said it too fast. The radio on his shoulder crackled and went quiet.

He took two steps toward her, big in his orange vest. "You're on private property, and now you're harassing a minor." "I'll have you run off and cited." The two dockworkers at the fence did not move. One of them turned his back and lit a cigarette under the eave. The gate road went quiet. Georgia could feel the shape of it turning. A woman in a patched coat against a man with a radio and a clipboard and a badge on his chest. Nobody in the world would believe her. That was the whole point of men like Wendell. They counted on it.

Georgia had owned this gate for nine years. She had not walked through it in five. Now she stood in it in a patched coat, and the whole crew read her as a stranger. Fine. That was how she had wanted it.

She looked down at the cap in her hands. Then she turned it inside out. Inside the crown, stitched in red yarn, was a single letter. E. Small. A little crooked on the last stroke. She knew that stitch. She had made it herself the winter Emory turned two. Her thumb traced the thread. Nobody else alive put that stitch on anything. The yarn was the same red she had bought at the hardware store in town. Her chest went tight.

Wendell was still talking. "County takes him, that's the end of it." "Not my problem." Georgia did not answer him. She was doing the math. Six winters. A cap that still fit a nine-year-old. Somebody had kept it clean and mended the cuff where it had torn. Somebody had buttoned that too-big flannel around him every morning. Somebody had taught him to cover his neck when a stranger looked too long. She thought of the box she had buried. Empty. The county told her the lake never gives some people back. She had stood in the Lutheran church in town with her sister's photograph on the same table. Two funerals in eleven days. Then she had gone home and signed checks from the kitchen and never once come down to the water. Because the water was the last place he had been.

Wendell cleared his throat. "Ma'am." Georgia looked up. Not at him. Past the gate, up the shore road, where the birches went gray and then black. The boy had run that way. Somebody had fed him and warmed him and hidden him, every day, three miles from her own dock. She folded the cap and put it inside her coat. She walked to her truck. Luis Arriaga followed her a few steps and stopped on the gravel. "He comes at night," Luis said. "Ten, sometimes eleven." Georgia turned around. "Who does?" "The boy." "He asks for nothing. I leave a sandwich on the step, and dry socks when it's wet." "Does he ever say where he goes?" "Up the shore. He won't say where." Luis looked at the road. "He only says he has to get back to her." Her. "He starts to say the name," Luis said. "Then he stops." Georgia got in her truck. Somebody had kept her son alive for five years and taught him to be afraid of a name. She turned the key. Then she drove up the shore road into the fog.