I kept my phone in my lap with Dad's number up. I kept seeing scissors.
"I'm going to say some things," Carla said, somewhere past the Berea exit. "You don't have to answer them. You don't have to forgive me. I just need to say them out loud once, in order, because I've never said them in order and I think I need to hear what they sound like."
I didn't say anything. She took that as permission, I suppose, or as the closest thing to it she was going to get.
"I grew up in Montgomery County," she said. "Outside Mount Sterling. In a double-wide on my grandmother's land, with my mother and my sister Tammy. My daddy left when I was four. And my mother kept things." She was quiet for a while. The Buick drifted toward the shoulder and she brought it back. "That's what we called it. Keeping things. Nobody said the other word then, or if they did, we didn't. She kept newspapers. Margarine tubs. Clothes from yard sales she never wore, with the tags still on. Broken lamps she was going to fix. By the time I was ten you couldn't get into the kitchen except sideways. By the time I was twelve my bedroom was full, all the way to the window, and I slept in the back seat of her Pontiac in the yard with a sleeping bag and a flashlight. That was two winters. When I was fourteen one of the cats got lost in the back bedroom and we didn't find it until it was too late, and the smell—" She stopped. "You could smell it on my clothes at school. Girls used to move their desks."
"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't want to say it. It came out anyway.
"When I was fifteen the county condemned the trailer. Tammy was nineteen and married by then and she took me in, and I lived on her couch in Winchester until I graduated, and I took two things with me out of that trailer. My birth certificate and a toothbrush. That's all. I didn't want anything else. I didn't want anything that had been in there." She drove for a while. "So I have a thing about old stuff, June. You've probably noticed."
"I noticed."
"I'm good at my job because I can't stand mess. I have never in nineteen years lost a chart. I know where every scrap of paper in that department is. Everything in its place, everything labeled, and anything you don't need goes, goes, goes." She laughed, not happily. "My therapist in Winchester used to say I was trying to win an argument with a trailer that got bulldozed in 2000."