"You don't know that. The charcoal guy's really good."
"The charcoal guy's grandpa looks like a potato." She almost smiled. Then she didn't. "You can still be mad at me. I mean it. You don't have to stop."
"I know," I said. "I'm not going to."
"Okay."
"For a while."
"Okay," she said again, and pulled the sleeves of the crimson sweatshirt down over her hands. She'd worn it. I'd noticed that when she came downstairs that morning. I'd thought about saying something and hadn't, and I still don't know if that was me not looking or me letting her have it.
My mother honked, two short taps, the way she honks at the dogs on her route to let them know she's coming. Krista went toward the car. I stood there a second longer looking back at the door of the Hessler, thinking about a white card on a wall and what it ought to say, and whether a picture can be called Everyone Home when one of the chairs is empty, or whether that's exactly when you call it that, because that's when you mean it most. I didn't know. I had until two.
Then I went and got in the car, in the front, and my mother pulled out onto Sixth Street, and in the back seat my sister said, to nobody in particular, that when we got home she was going to clear off the dining room table, all of it, every one of my shoeboxes, and eat a bowl of cereal there like a normal person, and I said if she touched my shoeboxes I'd kill her, and my mother said, "Girls," and turned on the radio, and none of us turned it off.