I didn't answer right away. I could feel the two of them behind me, my mother and my sister, not saying anything, waiting to see what I'd say, and I understood that whatever I said would be in the paper on Sunday, on eight hundred porches on Route 19, and on the little white card on the wall all winter.
"Can I think about it," I said. "Till this afternoon?"
"Till two," Mrs. Jagoda said. "Then I have to print."
Outside, in the parking lot, my mother went to get the car warm. Krista and I stood by the back door of the Hessler in the cold. She had her folder under her arm, the one from the crisis center, with draft thirty-one of her personal statement printed out inside it, which she had let my mother read and had not let me read, and an envelope already addressed to the Office of the Registrar, Northlake State University, which my mother was going to walk in herself on Monday morning at eight and hand across the counter and get stamped as received, because, she said, she has been putting things into people's hands for twenty-two years and she was not trusting this one to a slot.
"You don't know if they'll take you back," I said.
"No."
"I don't know if I'll win."
"You'll win."