by side, edges square. "We had a little girl in August, five years old, came in at two in the morning with nothing but a pull-up and one shoe. She took a set. She was holding them up to the window when the foster mom came to get her. Making them look at the parking lot." The woman squared the last box. "I don't know where she is now. You never do. But I remember she made them look out the window."
Cassia stood in front of the shelf with her hands at her sides.
The new blue one was in the middle. Dark hair, silver crown, a gown the color of deep water. The card on the back of the box would say what her favorite things were. Cassia did not need to read it. She reached up and took the box down and held it, and felt Elam go still behind her in the doorway, and felt the woman with the cats on her cardigan decide, kindly, to be very interested in a stack of toddler pajamas.
It would have been so easy. Nobody would have stopped her. He would have bought another one; he would have bought ten. Daffy, out of the lake.
She looked up at the sign. THESE GO OUT IN THREES - DO NOT SPLIT.
She put the box back. Between the yellow and the red, where it belonged, and pushed it until its edges lined up with the others.
"Somebody's going to need all three," she said, to nobody in particular.
Outside, the wind had come up off the mountains and it was colder. They stood between her car and his motorcycle, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was not uncomfortable, exactly. It was the silence of two people who had run out of the things they had prepared and were now in the part where nothing was prepared.
"Here's what I want," Cassia said finally. "I want to be clear, so you don't have to guess. I'm not calling you Grandpa. I'm not calling you Rumble. I don't know what I'm calling you yet. I'm not coming here every Sunday. I'm not ready to talk about my mother, the other one, Raelynn, I'm not ready. I have a statistics midterm in nine days and a car that needs brakes, and I need to be a person who does those things for a while. Okay?"
"Okay," he said.
"But I want her number."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took out the auto parts pen and a blank work-order slip from his vest, and wrote in his blocky slanted hand: RAE, and ten digits, and a Grand Junction area code. He gave it to her and she folded it and put it in her pocket next to the one-armed doll.
"She might not answer," he said. "Or she might answer wrong. She's well, but she's still Rae. I'd go slow."
"I'm not going to call her today."
"No."