"I'm there every day but Sunday," he said. "Seven to six. I'm not going to call you. I'm not going to come in here again. If you never use that, I'll understand. I'll buy my dolls at the Walmart."
She took the receipt. She did not thank him. She went in through the garden center doors and back through the store, past the potting soil and the patio furniture marked down for the season, past the pharmacy and housewares, and she did not let herself look back until she reached register nine, and then she did, and through the big front windows she saw him walking across the lot to his motorcycle with the bag held against his chest in both arms, the way you carry something that might break.
She did not wait for the birthday dinner.
She finished her shift. She did not know how she finished it, only that at some point the clock on the register said three o'clock and Shay was standing beside her saying go home, and that Bonita walked her to her car in the employee lot and stood at the driver's window while Cassia sat with her hands on the wheel.
"You want me to follow you home?" Bonita said.
"I'm not going home."
Bonita nodded as if she had expected that. She reached in through the open window and tucked a loose piece of Cassia's hair behind her ear, the way she did with lost children, and Cassia let her.
"Nineteen years," Bonita said. "Every October. I used to think he was crazy, you know. Then I used to think he was sad. Now I don't know what I think." She patted the door of the car twice, like a horse. "Go easy on everybody, mija. Including you."
The house on Lakeview Avenue was a brick ranch with a carport and a juniper hedge that her father trimmed into a shape he called "orderly" and her mother called "the bunker." Her father's truck was in the carport. Her mother's Camry was in the driveway. Through the front window she could see the blue light of the television and the shape of her father in his recliner, and she sat in her car at the curb with the engine running for almost ten minutes, holding the receipt with Elam's handwriting on it, before she turned the key off and went up the walk.
She had a key. She had always had a key. She rang the bell anyway.
Her mother answered it in a sweatshirt from the dental office where she had been the office manager for twenty-two years, the one that said SMILE, YOU'RE AT BREWER FAMILY DENTISTRY, and her reading glasses were pushed up on her head, and she had flour on her hands. "Cass," she said, delighted, and then, a half second later, in a different voice, "Cass. What's wrong."