"Why?"
It came out of her like something breaking.
"Why would you do that? Why would you keep me for eleven months and then just... was I bad? Was I too much? Did you just get tired of..."
"No." He took a step toward her and then stopped himself, and stepped back to where he had been. "No. God, no. You were the best thing that ever happened in that shop. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. You have to know that, whatever else."
"Then why?"
"Because I was dying."
She looked at him then. At the beard and the vest and the big scarred hands and the boots, at the whole weathered bulk of him standing in the October wind in a supercenter parking lot, and he did not look like a man who was dying. He looked like a man who could have pulled the light pole out of the ground.
"You don't look dead," she said.
"No," he said. "That turned out to be the problem."
She did not laugh, and he did not seem to expect her to. He shifted the bag to his other hand.
"Hepatitis C," he said. "I got it a long time ago. I was a different man, a long time ago, and I did some stupid things, and one of them was getting tattooed in a place in Trinidad with a needle I shouldn't have let near me, and maybe it was that and maybe it was something else, the doctors never could say. It sat in me for twenty years doing nothing I noticed. Then in 2008, the spring after you came to live with me, I got tired. I thought I was just old. I was forty-nine, I thought that's what fifty felt like coming. Then I turned yellow." He touched the skin under his eye with one thick finger. "Here first. Then everywhere. And they did the tests, and the doctor sat me down, a young guy, nice, and he said cirrhosis, and he said the treatment they had then, he said it worked maybe four times out of ten for the kind I had, and it would make me sicker than I'd ever been for a year while it tried. And he said if it didn't work, I had maybe five years. Maybe less. He said if I had affairs I should get them in order."
He said affairs as though it were a word in a foreign language.
"You were three," he said. "You'd already been taken out of one house in the middle of the night. You'd already lost your mother. And I sat in that doctor's office and I thought, I am going to be the second one. I'm going to be the second person