"Mama," she said out loud, experimentally, in the Sonic parking lot, and felt like a fool, and felt the hum go through her like a struck bell.
Caskey Cycle was a cinderblock building painted a green that had probably been cheerful once, between a tire place and a laundromat on the north side of Northern Avenue, with a roll-up door and a hand-lettered sign and a window upstairs with a curtain in it. Cassia drove past it twice on Tuesday morning before she parked. She had skipped her eight o'clock statistics class, which she had never done, and she had texted Gaby where she was going, which Gaby had demanded, and Gaby had texted back a string of knives and then, separately, a heart.
The roll-up door was open. Inside it smelled of oil and metal and old coffee, and a radio was playing a country station low, and there were three motorcycles in different stages of coming apart, and a pegboard of tools on the back wall with the outline of each one drawn on the board in black marker, so you would know where it went. There was a calendar beside the pegboard. It was from a parts supplier, and it said October 2026, and it was hanging on the same nail, she was almost sure, as the calendar in the photograph.
He was on a low stool beside one of the bikes with a wrench in his hand, and he heard her before he saw her, and he stood up so fast the stool fell over.
"I'm not here to hug you," she said.
"No, ma'am."
"I'm not here to call you anything."
"No."
"I read the letter." She stood just inside the door with her hands in her jacket pockets. Her right hand was closed around the doll. "Four years late. They kept it. You knew they might."
"I figured it was possible."
"You weren't going to say anything. On Saturday. When I said they never gave it to me. You just stood there."
"It wasn't mine to say." He set the wrench down on the workbench, carefully, in its outline on the pegboard. "I asked those people to do the hardest thing there is, which is love a kid that already had a hole in her. I wasn't going to stand in a parking lot and tell you they did it wrong."
"My mother says she was afraid I'd wonder what it would have been like with you."
He was quiet a moment. "Do you?"
"Yes," Cassia said. "Since Saturday. Every minute. And I hate it, because I had a good life. I want you to know that. I had a good life. I had a dad who sang at restaurants and a mom who drove me to volleyball at five in the morning and a dog named Gumbo and braces and a prom. It was good. It was mine. And now I can't look at it without seeing the other one standing behind it, like a ghost. You did that. Not on Saturday. In 2008. You did it with scissors."