She was little for ten. She had my coloring and her father's grin, and she had cut her own bangs the previous summer with the kitchen scissors so that they slanted up to the left, and she had refused ever since to let anyone fix them because she said it was her look now. She wore a purple puffer vest over everything, in all weather, because it had a zippered pocket on the inside where her phone fit and an outside pocket where her glucose tabs fit, and she had decided by herself, at nine, that the vest was her medical equipment. She dropped her backpack and kicked off her shoes and said, "Mom, guess what Ms. Taufa said," and before I could guess she was telling me, something about a field trip to the Perrine Bridge and the base jumpers, and her hands were moving, and I watched her the way I always watched her: from the outside in. Color in the face. Steady hands. No sweat at the hairline. Then I glanced down at my own phone on the counter. One hundred and twelve, holding steady, flat arrow. Good.
"Where's Kel?" she said.
"Upstairs."
She looked past me at the counter. At the phone in the sock. She went over to it, the way Kellan had, and bent and looked at it without touching it, and I saw her lips move. Thirty-one.
"Juni, leave his stuff alone."
"I'm not touching it." She straightened up. "It's getting worse."
"It's been worse for a while."
"No," she said. "It's getting worse faster."
I remember that she said that. At the time I thought it was one of those things kids say, with the confidence of having heard adults say things like it. I laughed and said, "Okay, Dr. Vosburgh," and she didn't laugh back. She took a cheese stick from the fridge and went upstairs too, and a minute later I heard her knock on her brother's door, two short knocks and a long one, and I heard the door open and shut.
I had no idea that they had a knock. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I want to explain about the night of the sixth, because everything that happened afterward came out of it, and because for a long time I thought I understood it, and I didn't.
The sixth was a Tuesday. I'd worked my shift. At Magic Valley, your phone goes into a locker at the start of the shift and it stays there until your break, and on the cold-chain floor where I worked there were no breaks that were long enough to walk to the locker room and back without getting written up by Darcy, the overnight lead, who was not a cruel woman but who had been written up herself for our numbers twice that summer and had the face of someone who would not let that happen a third time. So in practice my phone went into locker 114 at nine-fifty at night and came out at six-thirty-five in the morning, and for those eight and three-quarter hours I was a woman with no children. That was the deal. I'd known it was the deal when I took the job. It paid three dollars and forty cents an hour more than days. It meant I was home when the buses came. It meant I could take Juni to her endocrinology appointments in Boise every three months without losing a day's pay. It meant, after Kip left for Coeur d'Alene with his girlfriend and his child support became something that happened on the fifteenth of some months and not others, that we could keep the house on Fieldcrest. I had done the math on a legal pad at the kitchen table in March with a pencil, and I had done it four times, and it had come out the same each time.