"Marine Corps. Camp Lejeune. He sends Joyce and me a Christmas card." Denny looked at his hands. "He doesn't know about the door. He wouldn't remember it. It's nothing to him. It's just a thing I did."
"So when you saw Ruthie—"
"I saw him. That's all. I looked at her and I saw a kid standing at a counter carrying something for somebody, and the last time I saw that I smiled and held the door." He shook his head. "Tonight I thought, I'm not going to smile. I'm not going to hold the door. And it turned out that was the wrong thing too. I scared her."
"You did scare her." Lauren said it simply, without heat. She was looking at the crib, at her son's chest rising and falling under the ducks. "When I saw you through the window, standing over her with your badge out, I thought — I didn't know what I thought. I thought, he's going to take her somewhere. I'd told her not to go anywhere with anybody. I was standing there with Teddy, with my stomach turning over, thinking, I can't get down those stairs, and if he puts her in a car I can't get down those stairs." She was quiet a moment. "And then you sent the question. Yourself. Slow. With her card. And I thought, oh. He's asking me. He's not asking about me. He's asking me."
Denny didn't say anything.
"Both of those things happened," Lauren said. "You scared her and you listened to her. I don't know how you're supposed to do one without the other, honestly. If it was someone else's kid, I'd want you to ask. I'd want you to ask every time." She rubbed her eyes. "I just wish there was a way to ask that didn't start with the worst thing."
"So do I," said Denny. "Thirty-one years. I haven't found it."
"She found it," Lauren said, and nodded toward the couch, where her daughter lay asleep under a crocheted afghan with her rubber boots finally off and lined up side by side on the carpet. "She just — built one. She figured somebody wouldn't believe her, so she brought a way for them to find out without having to." She laughed softly. "I want to be her when I grow up."
At 6:50 a gray light came up behind Stimson Drug, and the morning was cold and washed clean, with a hard blue sky and wet yellow leaves plastered to Front Street. The sugar was one-ninety. The ketones were negative. Lauren Dalby stood at the kitchen counter in a fresh sweatshirt and drank coffee, which she said was a sign of life, and wrote the numbers on the whiteboard under her daughter's flashlight drawing, and at 7:05 the nursing agency called to say that they were still very sorry, and that Vonda would be out six weeks, and that they had nobody for tonight. Or tomorrow. They were working on it. They would call.
Lauren hung up and stood looking at the phone.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."