"I pulled your old file Friday," she said, "after Mrs. Rusnak called me from a payphone at seven at night and wouldn't hang up until I promised. Mrs. Ondrejka retired in '81. She left a note in it." She turned the folder around so I could read it. It was three lines in blue ballpoint, the slanted Palmer handwriting the nuns taught all of us. Exceptional with infants. Returned the child to the mother with more grace than I have ever seen. If this woman ever calls, say yes.
"I didn't call," I said. "He did. In a way."
"So I gather." Mrs. Stoltz closed the folder. "I can't make you a foster home by tonight, Mrs. Kovach. Nobody can. But a parent going voluntarily into treatment can name a caregiver she trusts, and if that caregiver passes a home visit, I can approve it as a temporary arrangement under our supervision while the paperwork catches up. It's not a license. It's a signature and a lot of paper." She uncapped a pen. "Mrs. Rusnak named you. I'll be at your house at two."
At two o'clock Mrs. Stoltz walked up a porch step that Lefty Sopko and Brother had torn out and replaced on Sunday afternoon with two-by-eights from the lumberyard on Poland Avenue, arguing the entire time about whether Lefty had measured it right, which he had not, and had to do over. She looked at the smoke detector Stosh's nephew had put up in the upstairs hall. She looked at the little back bedroom, which had been my sewing room and then a room where I put things I didn't want to look at, and which Pop and I had cleared out on Sunday night, until it held only the iron bed from the attic and a dresser and a quilt of my mother's. She asked Pop if he smoked. Pop said he'd quit in April, which was true, and that he'd quit again if he had to, which made her almost smile. She checked the furnace. She sat at the kitchen table, in the chair where my mother used to sit, and filled out a form on a clipboard with the dent in the linoleum right there under her shoe, and signed it.
They came that evening in Mrs. Stoltz's county car, a gray Plymouth Reliant, on the way to Warren. Casey had a duffel bag and the red bookbag. She came into my kitchen and stood there in her flannel shirt and looked around it, at the stove and the crab apple through the window over the sink and the green tank, and Pop got up out of his chair, which took him a while, and held out his hand, and said, "Mickey Kovach. I sang to your son in Slovak. I'm sorry for it, I can't carry a tune," and Tammy took his hand and burst into tears, and Pop, who had never in his life known what to do with a crying woman, just held on to her hand and let her.
Mrs. Stoltz gave us ten minutes. Casey went upstairs to look at his room with Pop clanking up behind him on Lady Bird, telling him about the Mayor. Tammy and I sat at the kitchen table.
"Don't let him forget me," she said.
"He's not going to forget you. He rode the bus halfway across Mahoning County on a school pass because of you."
"Don't let him call you Mom."
"He's got one," I said. "He told me so about forty times last week."