Health on Eastern Bypass, and she wore her work lanyard home most days and forgot it was on, so that half the time I was talking to her I was also talking to a laminated photograph of her looking surprised. She had it on now. Behind her, where the red-taped wall had been that morning, there was nothing but a dry rectangle on the concrete and a few curls of packing tape.
"Where's my quilt?"
She didn't pretend not to know what I meant. I'll give her that. I have thought about it a great deal since, and I'll give her that much. She set the tape gun down on the workbench very carefully, the way you set something down when you are buying yourself a second.
"The Methodist van came at two," she said. "I put it in with the linens."
"You put it in with the linens."
"June."
"You put Grandma's quilt in with the linens?"
"Honey, it was in bad shape. You know it was. There's a whole corner where the binding's gone, and the batting's coming out of two of the stars, and it smelled, Junie, it smelled like the inside of a basement. I washed it twice in August and it still smelled." She put her hand up to her forehead and then took it down again. "I'm not trying to be cruel. It was coming apart. It's not something you put on a bed in a new house."
I want to tell this right, so I'll say what I felt, which was not grief, not at first. It was something white and electric, like when you touch the fence at the Hensleys' by accident. It went from the soles of my feet to my teeth.
"It was on my bed," I said. "In my room. You went in my room and took it off my bed."
"I asked you about it a dozen times."
"You asked me if I wanted to pack it. I said no. I said I was going to carry it in the car."
"You said, 'Leave it, Carla,' and walked out of the kitchen. That's what you said." She took a breath. "And I thought about that. I thought about it all week. And I decided that sometimes the grown-up has to make the call the kid can't make."
"I'm sixteen."
"I know how old you are."
"You don't get to make that call. You're not—"
I didn't finish it. I didn't have to. It hung there between us in the gold light with the dust going around in it, the thing I had not said out loud in three years of not saying it, and I watched it land on her face, and I was glad. That's the truth. For one second I was glad.