"I didn't send him to beg."
"He didn't beg," I said. "He whispered that he didn't have any money, and then he sat there with his hands flat on the counter and waited to see if I'd throw him out. That's not begging, Tammy. That's the bravest thing I've seen anybody do in that diner in twenty years."
She took her hand down. Her eyes were wet and furious. "So you know," she said. "You know what I am. He told you."
"He told me you're sick. He told me you never once left him alone overnight. He said that twice, so I'd be sure to hear it."
That went into her somewhere. She sat down at the kitchen table all at once, the way Casey had sat down on the booth to sleep, and I sat down across from her, and for a while neither one of us said anything. Through the bedroom door we could both hear him not making any noise at all, which is a noise a child makes when he's listening as hard as he can.
"I used to hate you," Tammy said finally, to the table. "You know that? Every Wednesday. You'd hand him to me and he'd cry for you. He'd hold his arms out for you over my shoulder. And you'd walk out to the parking lot and I'd watch you through the window, smoking in your car, and I'd think, she gets to go home and be sad. I have to stay here and hold him while he cries for somebody else." She pressed her thumbnail into the table. "I was sixteen. I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to make him stop crying. You'd hand him over in that blanket and I'd think, she made that, and she knows how to knit, and she knows how to make him stop, and I don't know anything."
"I didn't know anything either," I said. "I learned it on him. Two weeks of screaming. I didn't sleep. Len moved to the couch."
She almost laughed. "He screamed for me, too, at first. When I got him back. Two weeks." She looked up. "And then I put him in the blanket."
"And he stopped."
"And he stopped." She rubbed her face. "That's when I stopped hating you. Not all at once. But that's when it started. I'd watch him in the dark with his hand on that bumpy row and think, she made him something that worked, and she gave it to me. Mrs. Ondrejka told me about Katie. You could have kept it and you put it in his bag." She was crying now, not making much noise about it, the tears just running. "I've thought about that more than I've thought about anything. I thought, there's one person in the world who loved him without needing anything back. I wanted him to know there was somebody like that. In case I couldn't—" She stopped.