"She would," Denny said.
The pharmacist stood a moment in the doorway, looking past him into the dim living room, at the crib, at the woman on the end of the couch with a bag of frozen peas on her neck and a glass of ginger ale in her hand.
"I almost just gave it to her," she said quietly. "Before you got up. I had the bag in my hand. I'd decided." She pressed her lips together. "And then when you started asking, I almost said no. I almost said, store policy, come back with an adult. I had that sentence ready too. It's a good sentence. It covers you." She looked at Denny. "Neither one of those would have been — I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to say."
"I know," said Denny.
"I've never seen anybody do anything like that."
"Me neither."
"Tell her—" The pharmacist stopped. "Tell her good job. Tell the girl. And tell her mom to call the doctor in the morning." And she turned, and went down the shining stairs, and crossed the street in the rain, and a minute later the lights in Stimson Drug went out one row at a time, and then the red-and-white sign, and Front Street was dark except for the laundromat.
At ten o'clock Lauren Dalby's phone rang with a call from a man in a church gym in Arcadia, Florida. Denny took himself back into the kitchen, out of range of the camera, and stood by the dark window with his hands in his pockets, and listened to her lie to her husband. She did it beautifully. She angled the phone so it showed the crib and her face and nothing else, and her voice was warm and only a little hoarse — a cold, she said, a tickle — and she asked about the crew and whether he was eating, and she let Ruthie lean into the frame and say goodnight, and she did not say pump and she did not say ketones and she did not say Vonda broke her wrist. At the end, when the man on the screen, whose voice was deep and slow with exhaustion, said, "You guys okay? Really?" she said, "Everything's OJ, Shane. Go to sleep."
There was a pause on the other end. Then the man laughed, a tired, surprised, real laugh. "OJ," he said. "Okay. Love you. Love you, Ruthie-bird."
After she hung up Lauren sat for a while with the phone face down in her lap.
"He'd have gotten in the truck," she said, to the room. "He'd have driven all night. He's been up since four."