Then he pulled the plastic chair over and sat down in it, because his knee was done with standing, and because what he was going to say next was not something he wanted to say looking down at her.
"I'm going to tell you about a man named Thorvald Mendell," he said.
She waited.
"Thorvald and I rode together. Back when the bike ran. We'd been friends since we were sixteen. He was best man at my wedding, which didn't last, but that wasn't his fault. And about a year after I started taking from the drug box, he started taking from me. I'd give him some. A little. To be generous. Like your friend Deb. He had a bad hip; I had a box full of morphine. And one night in his garage out in Horseheads, he took more than he should have, and he went down, and I was high myself and I knew what I was looking at, I knew exactly what I was looking at, and he could still talk a little, and he begged me not to call. Because I'd lose my job and he'd lose his, and his wife would find out, and. And I didn't call. I sat with him. I thought I could manage it. I thought I knew enough to manage it. I fell asleep on the floor of his garage, and when I woke up he was cold."
Celestina had both hands over her mouth now.
"That's how they caught me, eventually," Lazaro said. "Not that night. Months later. The coroner's report and some counts that didn't add up. It doesn't matter how. What matters is that I've thought about that night every single day for thirteen years, and the thing I think about isn't the drugs. It's that he asked me not to call, and I let that be the reason. Because it was easier. Because it protected me, too. Everybody was protected except Thorvald."
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the tattooed hands hanging loose between them.
"So I'm not going to bring it up," he said. "That's your story to tell, not mine. But if that woman out there asks me what Emi told me, I'm going to tell her what he told me. I'm not going to lie to her. I'm done lying for people. I lied for myself for a year and a half and I lied for Thorvald for one night and I've watched you lie for yourself one time and I've lived inside what that cost for six years. I'm not angry at you for it. I was. I might be again tomorrow. But I can sit here and not be angry and still tell you that I'm not going to do it."
"Then they'll take Emi," she said.
"Maybe. I don't know. I don't think a woman who's been clean six years, with a broken tooth and a doctor's note and a nine-year-old who can tell you what's for breakfast every day of the week, gets her kid taken because a friend handed her a fake pill. I could be wrong. But I'll tell you what else I think." He nodded toward the curtain, toward the hall, toward the nursing home a mile and a half away where it was coming up on shift change. "I think there's a baggie of those in Deb's purse right now, or in her husband's medicine cabinet. And I think there's another woman in that break room, or a man, with a bad back or a bad knee or a broken tooth and no money. And I think Deb's husband may have gotten them from somebody who's selling them to a lot of people with bad shoulders who think they're buying Percocet. And if you sit in front of that woman with the legal pad and tell her it was just you, just your mess, then nobody goes looking. And the next person who takes half to sleep for one hour doesn't have a kid who knows to come get me."