She looked at me like she didn't know what to do with that, and then she looked away and wiped her eyes with the cuff of her orchestra sweatshirt, quickly, the way you'd wipe a smudge off a window.
At five minutes to the hour, Dashiell went upstairs and came down with the sack. It was a big canvas drawstring bag, the kind sold for college dorms, faded red, with HESPER V. written on the bottom in laundry marker in a child's careful letters. I recognized it with a little jolt. It had been a camp bag, once. Hesper had taken it to the same Girl Scout day camp Dashiell went to, the summer they were seven, and I had driven them both.
"I'll walk you over," I said.
"Mom, you don't have to—"
"I'm not doing it for you," I said. "I'm doing it because I owe your mother a conversation, and I've owed it to her for five years."
We went the long way, out my front door and around the corner from Foxglove onto Larkspur, on the sidewalk, in broad daylight, where anyone could see. I think that mattered to Hesper. It mattered to me. Mrs. Okereke was out on her porch on Aster with her husband in his wheelchair beside her, and she waved at me, and then she saw who I was walking with and what Dashiell was carrying, and her eyebrows went up into her hairline, and I waved back as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Ottoline opened the door before we knocked. She'd been watching for us. She'd changed out of the blazer into a cardigan, and somehow that made her look smaller, and older, and more like the woman who'd brought me a lasagna twelve years ago.
Dashiell held out the bag. "It's all there," he said. "It's clean. I'm sorry I kept it so long."