There was a home study. A licensing worker named Mr. Fitch came to the house three times and looked into every room and asked questions Sam had never been asked by anyone. About his childhood. About his marriage. About Elena's death and how he had grieved it, and how he had not. About his drinking, which had been heavier than he liked to admit in the first year, and which he had stopped, quietly, the night he found Nora asleep on the bathroom floor waiting for him to come home. About his discipline philosophy. About whether he kept firearms in the house. He did not. About whether he understood that the goal for June was reunification with her mother, and whether he could live with that.
"I've been living with it since the night I found her," Sam said.
Mr. Fitch wrote that down.
There were background checks and fingerprints and a medical exam and a fire inspection. Sam replaced the smoke detectors, every one of them, himself, because he was an electrician and he could not stand the thought of anyone else's wiring in his walls. He painted the small spare room at the end of the upstairs hall, the room that had been Elena's sewing room, a pale purple, because purple was better. Nora picked out the curtains. They had moons on them.
And every Saturday, through December and January and into February, they drove to Coplay.
June grew. That was the first thing Sam noticed, every week. Her face filled out. Her cheeks got pink. Her cough went away and did not come back. Maureen Brennan cut her hair to her chin so the curls could stop matting, and taught her to knead bread, and Walt taught her to play checkers and let her win, and then stopped letting her win, and she started winning anyway. She had nightmares; Maureen told Sam about them, frankly, standing at the kitchen counter while June showed Nora how Tripod could shake hands. She wet the bed some nights. She hid crackers in her pillowcase for the first month. She was afraid of belts and men's raised voices and the sound of a car door slamming at night. She was six, and she had been through things no one should go through at any age, and she would carry them for a long time.
But every Saturday, when Sam's truck came up the gravel lane, she was waiting on the porch swing with Tripod, and she came flying down the steps yelling, and the thing she yelled was always the same.
He asked Gloria once, privately, whether he should correct her.
"Correct her how?" Gloria asked.
"About calling me Daddy. I'm not. She has a mother. I don't want to confuse her. I don't want her mom to feel like I'm..." He didn't know how to finish.
Gloria was quiet for a moment.