"Not this," my mother said. "Not—I didn't know this. But in July, Rosetta said something to me. At the station. At the cases. She said, 'The Doctor's getting a lot of certified from the college, huh? Hope everything's all right.' And I said, oh, it's financial aid, they make you sign for everything now. I said it just like that. I didn't even think. I said it like I knew." She pressed her lips together. "And I came home that night and I thought, I should ask. I stood right there in that kitchen and I thought, I should go up and knock on her door and ask. And I didn't. Because I'd told the whole route. Because I had told eight hundred houses that my daughter was going to be a nurse, and Toomey, and the guy at the Sheetz, and the lady with the oxygen, and I didn't—" Her voice broke. "I didn't want to have to go back out on Route 19 and tell them anything different. That's the truth. That's how big I am. I didn't open it because I didn't want to deliver it."
"Mom," Krista said.
"And then this one—" She turned to me, and I knew before she said it what she was going to say, and I didn't want her to say it. "And then you got the Hessler. And I put you in my pocket."
She touched her shirt pocket. The laminated article was still in it. You could see the stiff square shape of it through the cloth.
"I carried you around in my pocket," she said, "and I showed you to everybody. And I would like to tell you that was all because I'm so proud of you, Maren, and I am, I am, God help me, I'm so proud of you I can't see straight. But some of it was that I couldn't carry your sister anymore. I knew something was wrong with her and I didn't want to look, so I needed something else to hold up. I needed something else to show people. I put you in there because there was a hole in my pocket where she used to be."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I felt like somebody had taken the putty knife to me too, very carefully, one row at a time, and found something written underneath that I hadn't known was there, and I wasn't sure yet if I hated them for it.
Because she was right, and I'd known it. Not known. Noticed. Eight years of "that's beautiful, baby" without looking very long, and then one letter from a gallery and she's sitting on the floor against the dishwasher. I'd felt, a little, all that fall, like someone wearing a coat that belonged to somebody else. I'd liked the coat. I'd liked it so much I didn't ask whose it was.
"So that's," my mother said, and stopped. "So that's what I did."
She sat down in one of the dining room chairs. It was the first time anybody had sat in one in about two months. She put her face in her hands.