"In case you couldn't be that," I said.
"In case I can't," she said. "In case I go up there to Warren on Monday and I can't do it."
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers, the one with the chewed nails, and she let me, which surprised both of us.
"He asked me if he could stay with me," I said. "For the twenty-eight days."
Through the bedroom door the not-noise got even quieter.
Tammy looked at me for a long time. Then she said, very carefully, as if she were stepping out onto ice, "I asked Mrs. Stoltz. Last week. I asked if he could go to you. I didn't even know if you were alive. I said there was a lady in Struthers who fostered him, Delores Lesko, and Mrs. Stoltz looked it up and said there was no Delores Lesko on the list, the license lapsed years ago, and anyway there's no time, a home study takes months." She swallowed. "So I told her forget it. And then I told him the story that night, and I guess he didn't forget it."
"It's Kovach now," I said. "I went back to my name."
"Is that why she couldn't find you?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe partly."
We sat there. The refrigerator hummed. Under the strawberry magnet the woman with red hair stood in front of a house that wasn't mine, that was a nine-year-old's idea of mine, built out of a crab apple tree and a bad porch step and a man with a green tank, and was somehow more like it than any photograph.