The radio had gone to a commercial for a furniture store. Neither of them heard it.
"I had a whole speech," he said. "I'd practiced it on the bike. I didn't say any of it. I just took her and you went and got in their car. And a week later it was your birthday, and I didn't have anywhere to be, so I went to the Kmart. I don't know why. I went to the aisle and I stood there and I thought about some other kid somewhere, tonight, with a bag of clothes that aren't hers, sitting up in the dark with her eyes open. And I bought three. Because one's lonely. And I drove them to Court Street and gave them to a lady at the front desk and asked her to make sure they went out together, all three to one kid, never split up. And she looked at me like I was out of my mind. And I did it the next year. And the next." He shrugged, a small, heavy movement. "That's why three. That's all it is."
Cassia found she had sat down. She did not remember doing it. She was on an upturned milk crate by the workbench, and her face was wet, and she did not wipe it.
"I don't remember any of it," she said. "Not the shoebox. Not the Kmart. Nothing. You're telling me the most important thing that ever happened to me and I don't remember it."
"I know."
"So it's all yours. You've got all of it. I've got a doll with one arm."
"I know," he said again. "I'm sorry. I'd give it to you if I could. That's partly why I kept doing the dolls, I think. So it'd be somewhere besides just in me."
She wiped her face finally, with the heel of her hand, hard.
"Why did they change my name?"
He sat down on the stool then, slowly. "Your mother," he said. "Summer of 2008. She was out of the hospital and off her medicine again and she came here. To the shop. She had a bag packed for you. She was going to take you to her friend's in Albuquerque. She wasn't violent. She was never violent. She was just certain, the way she got, that everyone was lying to her and she was the only one who could see. And I wouldn't let her up the stairs. I stood on the third step and she stood at the bottom and you were asleep up there in your shoebox room and she screamed at me for an hour. And then I called the county. On my own daughter." He looked at his hands. "When it came time for the adoption, the caseworker asked me if I