who she is. She's on medication now and doing better than she has in her whole life. She doesn't speak to me much. She's got reasons. If you ever want to know about her I'll tell you everything I know, and if you ever want to find her I'll help you, and if you never want either one of those things, that's yours to decide too.
The third thing I'm not going to write down. It's about three princess dolls, and it's too long, and it's the only thing I've got left of you that's mine, and I'm selfish enough to want to tell it in person if I ever get the chance. If I don't, that's all right. I've told it to myself enough times that it'll keep.
I'm at the shop every day but Sunday. Caskey Cycle, Northern Avenue. I'll be there as long as I'm alive, which now looks like it might be a while.
Happy birthday, whichever one this is.
Elam Caskey (Rumble)
She read it three times. The limeade sweated a ring onto the console. The carhop came by on her skates and asked if everything was all right and Cassia said yes and the carhop looked at her face and at the one-armed doll on the dashboard and skated away without asking again.
She did not cry, which surprised her. She had expected to. She sat with the pages on her knees and felt something stranger than crying, a kind of vertigo, as if the ground of her life had been a floor she had always assumed was solid and someone had just shown her the joists. Her whole childhood had been built on a sentence. Unable to care for. And under the sentence there had been, the entire time, a man at a kitchen table with a pair of scissors and a magnifying glass, cutting himself out of her.
She was angry at him. She checked, the way you check a tooth with your tongue, and it was there, hot and raw. He had decided. He had decided for a three-year-old who loved him what she could and could not survive, and he had been wrong, and she was the one who had paid for it, at eleven, screaming in a Target parking lot. He had chosen her a clean start the way you would choose an engine part, and clean starts were not a thing that happened to people. She knew that now. Nobody started clean. You just started with the dirt where you could not see it.
And under the anger, worse than the anger, was the thing her mother had been afraid of. She did wonder. She was already wondering. A garage, a workbench, here you go, Rumble. A life with grease under its fingernails. She did not even know if she would have liked it. That was not the point. The point was that someone had taken it off the table before she was old enough to know there was a table.
She looked at the doll on the dashboard.