"And then," Derek said, and grinned again, letting the room off the hook, "I visited her at Riverside every day for two weeks, and she told me to stop bringing flowers because the nurses were making fun of her. And I said, okay, how about dinner instead. And she said yes. And now —" he lifted the flute — "she said yes again. So I guess I'd go in that water a hundred more times. To Talia."
"To Talia!" the floor said, and there was the dull clack of plastic flutes, and whooping, and Kaylee was crying openly, and Dwayne was thumping Derek on the back.
I stood behind the copier with the folder against my hip and my hands folded in front of me, and I looked at my hands.
There are scars on both of my palms. On the right, a long one, pale and slightly raised, running from the base of my index finger diagonally almost to my wrist, with the ladder marks of eleven stitches still faintly visible on either side of it if you know to look. On the left, three shorter ones, crossing each other, and a small dent in the heel of the hand where a piece of tempered glass went in deep enough that the urgent-care doctor had to dig for it with a pair of forceps while I sat on the paper-covered table in my wet slacks and shook so hard that she had to call in a nurse to hold my arm still. I do not usually look at them. I keep my hands folded, palms in. It is a habit, like the beige.
Then Talia stepped forward to say something, and I made myself lift my head and listen, because I had promised myself that I would listen, and that I would not do anything unless I had to.
But before I tell you what Talia said, I have to explain about the beige, or none of the rest of it makes sense.
I was born in Kentucky, in a town outside Bowling Green whose name I do not use, to a man whose name I do not use either. When I was seven years old, my mother woke me at three in the morning with her hand over my mouth and her face very close to mine, and she said, in a voice I had never heard her use, "We are going on a trip now, and you will not make one sound." I did not make one sound. We went out the back door in our socks, carrying our shoes, and walked a mile and a half along the shoulder of a county road in the dark to a gas station where a woman from her church was waiting in a Buick with the headlights off. My mother's left eye was swollen shut.
We lived in nine places in the next eleven years. Tennessee, then Indiana, then Ohio, then Indiana again, then Ohio for good. My mother changed our last name twice. The second time, she took it off the side of a moving truck we passed on Route 33 — COYLE & SONS, SINCE 1961 — and said it out loud a few times in the car, testing it, and then said, "Etta Coyle. That's a good plain name. Nobody looks twice at a Coyle." She was afraid of my father every single day of her life, including, I think, the years after a cousin wrote to tell her that he had died of a stroke in a VA hospital in Louisville. Fear like that does not get the news.