She laughed, wet. She looked at her hands, the chewed nails. "I'm scared I won't come back," she said. "Not like run away. I mean come back the same. Better. I'm scared I'll come back and be the same."
"Then you'll go again," I said. "And he'll be here again. That's what I'm for, Tammy. I'm not a mother. I'm the place he already was."
She looked at me a long time. Then she said, "You gave him back once."
"I know how," I said. "It's the part I'm good at. Ask Mrs. Ondrejka."
When they left, Casey stood on the new porch step in my cardigan, which he would not give back, and his mother hugged him so hard she lifted him off it, and then she got into the gray Reliant and it went up Fifth Street with its taillights in the cold, and he didn't cry. He stood there with his hand in his jacket pocket, and I knew what he was holding in there, and I knew which row his thumb was on.
That was November. I'm writing this down in the middle of December, at the kitchen table, at night, because the house is quiet and because somebody ought to write it down while it's still happening.
Here is what I know so far. Every Sunday afternoon is family day at the program in Warren, and I drive Casey up Route 422 in the Malibu with the heater going, and he and his mother sit in a room with orange plastic chairs and play Uno, and I sit in the parking lot. I don't smoke anymore. I knit. I took the needles out of the cedar chest the second week. I'm making a scarf, green, in a basketweave, for Tammy, for when she comes out, and there's a crooked row in it already because Casey kicked the dashboard laughing at something on the radio. I left it in.
Helen opened the grill on Thanksgiving for the old mill men who had nowhere to go, the way she has every year since 1977, and Casey wore a paper cook's cap and carried out the plates of turkey, and Lefty Sopko tipped him a dollar, and Brother tipped him a dollar, and Stosh took the Polaroid down off the wall behind the counter, the one from Christmas 1975, and taped a new one up beside it, the same five of us, Helen and Stosh and Marge and me, and a nine-year-old in front of the pie case with his hand flat on the counter like a mayor. The man from Akron came back in December and knocked on the walls again. Helen hasn't said yes or no. The Dollar Bank sent another letter with a red stripe, and I opened this one, and called them from the payphone at the grill on my break, and a woman with a nice voice set up a plan that I can almost make if the tips hold through Christmas. Pop's breathing is the same. Some nights it's worse.
Tammy's twenty-eighth day is next Monday, the seventeenth. Mrs. Stoltz says she's doing well. Mrs. Stoltz also says that doing well in there and doing well out here are two different animals, and that it may be a while yet before the paperwork lets go. Tammy asked me last Sunday, through the window of the Malibu, if Casey could keep coming to Helen's after school even when he's home with her. I said the back booth was his. I don't know what will happen after Monday. I don't know if she'll come out better or the same. Nobody does. That's the thing about the people on the milk cartons that I never understood before, pouring past their faces three hundred times a day: the ones who get found aren't finished either. They just get to start again from somewhere they already were.
It's late. Pop's asleep; I can hear the concentrator going through the wall. A while ago I went up and looked in on Casey in the little back room, because I can't help it, because I've been looking in on him every night like I did on Poland Avenue. He was asleep on his side with my mother's quilt kicked off and the yellow square under his cheek, and his thumb was on the crooked row, rubbing it back and forth in his sleep, over the night Katie died, over the K, over all of it. I stood in the door a long time. Then I came in, and pulled the quilt up, and left the door open a crack, the way he likes it, so the light from the hall can get in.