He took it. He did not argue and he did not look away.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
They stood there with the radio playing between them, a man singing about a truck, and then she took her hand out of her pocket and put the doll on the workbench, the one-armed yellow princess with the felted hair and the pink-dotted crown, and stood it up against a coffee mug full of pencils.
He made a sound she had never heard a person make. It was very small. He put out one finger, the way you would put out a finger to a bird, and touched the crown.
"You colored that," he said. "With my marker. The one I used for the pegboard. I thought it was permanent and it wasn't, it came off on everything, it came off on the sheets." His voice went rough. "Mama. You kept Mama."
"My dad told me what I called her. I didn't remember."
"No," he said. "No, you wouldn't."
He went to the back of the shop, to where his motorcycle was parked inside by the stairs, and he unbuckled the left saddlebag and took out a coffee can, a big old Folgers can with the label worn half off and the plastic lid taped down, and he brought it to the workbench and peeled back the tape and took the lid off. Inside, wrapped in a red bandanna, was a second doll. Same size, same stiff legs, same painted slippers. Her hair was red, or had been, and her dress was green, and she had a tiny plastic bow in one hand with the string long gone. Her paint was in much better shape than Mama's. She looked like a doll that had been carried, but not played with. Kept.
He stood her beside the yellow one, against the pencil mug.
"That's the longer story," he said.
Cassia looked at the two dolls. The light from the open door came across the workbench and lay on them, yellow and green.
"Tell it," she said.
He picked up the stool and set it right and did not sit on it.
"When you came to me," he said, "you didn't have anything. They'd taken you out of your mother's place at three in the morning in November. She'd walked you down to the levee at the river in her nightgown, because she thought there were people coming for you, and a man walking his dog found you both and called it in. You'd been at a stranger's house for twelve days, with a bag of clothes that weren't yours. You didn't talk. You'd talked before, you talked all the time, but you didn't talk to me that first week.