He did not sit down. He stood a few feet away from the bench with the plastic bag hanging from one hand, as if he did not think he had the right to sit next to her, and she did not tell him he could. It was cold for October, the sky a hard pale blue over the Wet Mountains to the southwest. She had come out without her jacket. She folded her arms over the blue Highline polo and her name tag and did not care.
"I'm Elam," he said. "Elam Caskey."
Caskey. CASKEY, GIRL. The hospital bracelet, so small you could not believe a wrist had ever been inside it.
"You're my father," she said.
It was the first thing she could think of and she said it flatly, like a fact on a form, and she watched him flinch.
"No," he said. "No, ma'am. I'm... Raelynn's your mother. Raelynn's my daughter. I'm your grandfather." He stopped, and seemed to reconsider the word, as if he had picked up a tool and found it was the wrong size. "I was. I am. I don't know what I'm allowed to say I am."
She looked at the parking lot. A woman was loading potting soil into a Subaru. Cassia watched her so she would not have to look at him.
"The book says my mother was unable to care for me," she said. "That's the whole sentence. That's all it says. Unable to care for. And it says my father was unknown. And it says that I was in the care of a relative for a period of approximately eleven months. A relative. That's what it says. I used to think it was an aunt. I made up an aunt. She had a dog."
"It was me," he said. "The eleven months. That was me."
"And then what?"
He did not answer right away. He looked down at the bag in his hand, and then at the bike, and then back at her, and she saw him make a decision, saw it cross his face the way a cloud's shadow crosses a field.
"And then I gave you up," he said.
The wind took a dry leaf across the asphalt with a sound like paper tearing.
"I want to tell you that something took you from me," he said. "I've told myself a lot of versions where that's how it went. But it isn't. Nobody took you. There was a judge and there was a caseworker and there was a family that wanted you, but I'm the one who went into the office and signed. I'm the one who asked them to find somebody else. I'm the one who cut myself out of those pictures with a pair of kitchen scissors so you wouldn't remember me." He swallowed. "I don't say that so you'll feel sorry for me. I say it because you're going to find out anyway, and I'd rather you heard it from my mouth than read it in a file."