By the time I got home I had him on a milk carton. I had him in the river. I had him in the back of a white panel van with no windows, which was the thing every mother in the valley had in her head that year, and here I was not even his mother, not even anything. Pop heard me up at two in the morning and came to the top of the stairs dragging Lady Bird behind him, the wheels going bump on each step, and said, "Go to bed, Delores, you're making the house nervous."
Friday the weather turned, the way it does in the valley in November. The wind came down off Lake Erie with sleet in it sideways, and by noon the sleet was hitting the front windows like somebody throwing rice. Nobody came in for lunch but the mailman and two Ohio Edison men who sat in their booth steaming like horses. Helen sent Stosh home at two-thirty. Then she looked at the empty dining room and lit a cigarette and said, "Dodie, I'm going to the bank before it closes. You lock up at four if it's like this. Marge called, her road's iced."
"Okay."
Helen stood with her coat half on. She was looking at me. "That boy coming today?"
"I don't know."
"If he does," Helen said, "there's chicken noodle in the well, and a half a meatloaf in the cooler, and you heat it up for him. Don't you dare ring it." She buttoned her coat. "And then you find out who he is, Delores. Because Marge is right, and you know it, and I'm too old to worry about you on top of everything else."
At twenty-five after four, with the CLOSED sign already turned and the lights over the back booths off and me counting the drawer at the register, somebody knocked on the glass of the front door.
He was soaked through. The pompom hat was so wet it had gone black. His jacket was dark at the shoulders and his jeans were soaked to the knee, and he was hugging the red bookbag to his chest in front of him instead of wearing it, to keep it dry, I realized later. I unlocked the door and pulled him in by the shoulder and the bell rang over us like it was surprised.
"Casey, my God. Where's your coat? Where's your—you walked from the bus? Look at you. Look at your shoes."
"The bus broke," he said. His teeth were going. "On Midlothian. We had to get off. I walked."
"From Midlothian?" That was a mile and a half, most of it uphill, in sleet. "Why didn't you just go home?"