It had taken six weeks to get the appointment. Six weeks of mornings at the door.
He was better now. Not well, but better. He had a word for the feeling — the wave, he called it, because Dr. Ines had taught him about waves, how they rise and break and go back out — and he had breathing he could do, and a plan for lunch, which was that he ate it in the library with Mrs. Castellano, who let him shelve returns. It was not the life she wanted for him. It was a life he could get through. Some days that was the whole job.
And then, in January, he'd come to her with his own plan, written on a piece of notebook paper in his careful, crowded handwriting, with numbers in a column like hers.
She'd laughed, at first, and then seen his face and stopped laughing.
"Grandpa said he'd pay me," Jordan had said. "Twenty a Saturday. If I sort the whole back wall. And I have one-eighty from Christmas and Dad's birthday card from last year that I didn't spend. And Grandpa said if I do twelve Saturdays he'll put in the rest. But you can't tell Caleb. You have to promise. It has to be a surprise or it won't work."
"Won't work how, bug?"
He'd explained it. He'd explained it so seriously, so completely, with such airtight eleven-year-old logic, that she'd had to go into the bathroom afterward and run the faucet and sit on the edge of the tub for a minute.
She had promised. Of course she had promised. It was the first thing he'd wanted — really wanted, with his whole chest — since the morning at the door.
Now she sat with the pencil and thought about Caleb's face when she'd said not this spring. The way he'd picked up his backpack. The door he hadn't slammed. Caleb had always been her easy one, her steady one, the one she didn't have to worry about, and she knew — she knew, she had been raised by Walt Kessler and she had a sister named Kim — exactly what it meant to be the one nobody had to worry about. You got very good at not needing anything. You got so good at it that people forgot to check.
She'd sworn, when Caleb was born, when Jordan was born, that she would never do to either of them what had been done to her. She had sworn it with a baby on her chest and a hospital bracelet on her wrist.
"Five more weeks," she said to the empty kitchen. "Then he'll understand."
She believed it. She would remember, later, how completely she believed it.
* * *
Jordan's birthday fell on a Sunday in the middle of March, which was the kind of day that couldn't decide whether to be winter. There was frost on the windshields in the morning and by two o'clock the gutters were running and the whole street smelled like wet dirt.