"No." His father stood again, but slowly this time. He picked up his keys from the hook by the door. "She sat in that kitchen. Do you understand that? She sat at the table and she watched him go through every picture in that house with a pair of shears, and she didn't say one word. She let him send them back. Every week for a year she let him write No such person on my letters, and she never once got in the car and drove to Vancouver. It's eighteen hundred miles. People drive it. She didn't." His voice cracked down the middle. "I was twenty. And she let me be dead."
"Ray," his mother said. "Where are you going?"
"Out."
The screen door banged. A minute later they heard the truck start, and back down the driveway too fast, and its tires bark on the street, and then it was gone, and the kitchen was very quiet, and the meatloaf had gone cold.
Carter looked at the photograph of the boy at Warren Ballpark, squinting, grinning with one side of his mouth.
He hadn't asked whether she'd said one word. He hadn't asked if the letters were all she'd done. He hadn't asked anything. He realized, with a sinking feeling, that nobody had ever asked her anything at all.
* * *
His mother called in. Carter had never heard her do it before. She stood at the kitchen phone in her pink scrubs and said, "Marge, it's Lena, I can't come tonight, it's a family thing," and then listened, and said, "No, everybody's all right. Nobody's hurt," and then listened again and closed her eyes and said, "No. That's not true. I'll explain later," and hung up.
They sat on the back step while the sun went down behind the Tucson Mountains. The yard was gravel and a single mesquite, and the sky over it went orange and then pink and then a deep bruised blue. Nighthawks were diving after bugs above the streetlight. His mother had taken her hair down and was turning a bobby pin over and over in her fingers.
"Are you mad at me?" Carter asked.
"No."
"Is he?"
"Yes." She tucked the bobby pin behind her ear. "But not at you. Not really. He's mad at the drawer."
"I didn't mean to—"
"I know." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "You meant to a little."