"Okay."
"And your license. Or a picture of it. Your real license, in your wallet, so they know it's yours."
"Okay."
"And your card to pay. And the cooler bag with the blue ice thing, because the pens have to stay cold till you open one."
Her mother was watching her now with an expression Ruthie could not quite read.
"And if they still don't believe me," Ruthie said, "you'll be at the window."
She pointed. Through the rain-streaked glass the pharmacy glowed across the street, close enough that they could see the shape of somebody moving behind the counter in the back.
"I can't come down, baby."
"You don't have to come down." Ruthie got up and went to her backpack, which hung on the hook by the door, and unzipped the small front pocket, and took out two things. The first was a flashlight about as long as her hand, black aluminum, heavy for its size, with a rubber button on the end: her father's, the one he had given her the day he left for Florida, saying, keep an eye on things, Ruthie-bird. The second was a card, the size of a playing card, laminated in the school library's laminator so it was stiff and shiny. On it, in Ruthie's own careful printing in two columns, was the alphabet, and next to each letter a row of dots and dashes.
Her mother laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, almost a cough, and her eyes filled up at the same time.
"Oh my God," her mother said. "Oh, Ruthie."
They had learned Morse code in the spring, during the bad weeks after Teddy came home and before Vonda came, when her mother could not leave the apartment at all, not even to walk Ruthie down to the bus. Ruthie had found the book at the school library, a thin orange paperback called Secret Codes and Signals for Young Detectives, and she had brought it home because the chapter on Morse said that sailors used it to talk between ships with lights when they could not use their voices, and Ruthie had thought: that's like us. That's like Mom and me, with the window. So in the mornings, standing at the bus stop under the green awning of Stimson Drug, Ruthie would turn on her flashlight and point it up at the apartment window, and flash, slowly, dash-dash-dash, dot-dash-dash-dash. O, J. It was supposed to be OK. She had mixed up the K and the J on the very first morning, and her mother had flashed back a puzzled dot-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot, which was a question mark, and then, after a long pause, a whole sentence that took two minutes and made the bus driver honk: WHY ORANGE JUICE. After that OJ was their word for fine. And her mother, upstairs at the window with Teddy in the crook of her arm, would flash back with her phone: dot-dash-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot-dash, dot. LOVE. Every school morning since April. Ruthie's mother had made her own card, on an index card, and kept it on the windowsill. Somewhere along the way she had stopped needing it.