"I can't promise you anything tonight," I said. "My father's on oxygen. I'm behind on my house. My job might not last the winter. I'm not a—I'm not a foster mother anymore, Tammy, I'm a waitress with a bad back and a Malibu with one door. I have to think."
"I know," she said.
"And I have to think whether I can do it again. Hand him back. Because that's what I'd be doing. In twenty-eight days. That's the whole point of it, you understand? I'd be keeping him so I could give him back to you. That's what it would be for."
"I know," she said again. "That's what it was for last time, too."
I went to the bedroom door and knocked and opened it. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in my cardigan with his sneakers still on, holding the yellow square, and he looked up at me with a face that had been listening to every word through the door, and was trying very hard not to hope, and was failing at it.
"I'm going to go home and talk to my father," I said. "And I'm going to think. And I'll come back. Tomorrow. That I promise you. Whatever I decide, I'll come back here tomorrow and tell you myself, and I won't send it in a letter, and I won't have somebody else tell you. Okay?"
He nodded. "Okay."
"Okay," I said, and I went down the outside stairs in the sleet, and got in the Malibu, and hit the dashboard, and drove home to Struthers with the radio off and the heater going and my hands shaking on the wheel the way they had shaken on a Thursday night in March of 1973.
Pop was at the kitchen table when I came in. He'd waited up. He never waited up. He had the Jumble done and the Vindicator folded, and Lady Bird beside him hissing, and a cup of coffee in front of him that had gone cold a long time ago.
I sat down across from him. I didn't take my coat off. I told him all of it, from the yellow square in the booth to the drawing on the refrigerator, and I watched his face while I told it, and when I said the name Dougie his big hand on the table closed up into a fist and then opened again, slowly, and lay flat.