"Where does she think you are?"
"At the library after school. On Rayen. I always am. I'm usually home by six."
I looked at the clock over the pie case. It was ten after five, and pitch dark out, and sleeting, and the buses were broken down on Midlothian.
"Get your shoes on," I said. "They're still wet, I'm sorry. Get your shoes on and your coat and my sweater over it, and you can keep the sweater. I'm taking you home."
"Are you going to tell her?"
"I'm going to tell her you're safe," I said. "And then we'll see."
I drove a 1976 Chevy Malibu then, brown, with a passenger door that only opened from the outside and a heater that worked if you hit the dashboard with the heel of your hand. I hit it all the way into the north side, and Casey sat beside me in my cardigan with the yellow square in his lap and gave me directions in a small, precise voice: left at the Arby's, right at the church with the green doors. The radio was playing "Born in the U.S.A.," and I turned it off, because I couldn't stand to hear Springsteen sing about a dead steel town while I was driving through one.
It was not the building on Ohio Avenue. It was a duplex on a side street off Elm, gray siding, a chain-link fence, a plastic Big Wheel lying on its side in the frozen yard that I learned later belonged to the family downstairs. There was a light on upstairs. When we came up the walk the upstairs door flew open before we got to it and a woman came down the outside stairs in her socks, in the sleet, without a coat.
"Where were you? Where were you? I called the library, I went down to the payphone and called the library and they said you weren't there, they said you haven't been there all week, Casey, I was about to call the police, I was about to—" and then she saw me, behind him, under the porch light, and stopped on the bottom step with her hand on the rail.
She was twenty-six years old. I did the arithmetic later. She looked forty. She was very thin, in a man's flannel shirt and sweatpants, and her hair was still long and parted in the middle but there was no shine to it, and her face had that gray, pinched look I had seen on men at the end of the bar at the Slovak Club, the look of someone whose body is arguing with them all day long. She still chewed her fingernails. I could see it from where I stood. She looked at me, and I watched her try to place me, and I watched her do it.