"I didn't know about the dots," she said. "I swear to you. I didn't see them until she—until right before. She said she was going to tell you about the dots, and I didn't know what she meant, and then I looked, and I saw them, and I counted them. Nine. And I knew she'd been counting me. My daughter had been standing in this kitchen every afternoon smelling my breath and counting. And I—" She stopped. Her hands were trembling now on the table, both of them, and she pressed them down harder. "I'm not going to say I didn't know what I was doing. I knew what I was doing. I was drunk and I was ashamed and I was terrified, and she was standing there holding all of it, and I hit her for holding it. That's what I did. I hit her because she was right."
They sat across from each other in the wrecked kitchen with the drawers hanging open and the coffee grounds on the floor.
"Why didn't you call Rosario?" he said at last.
Rosario Benavides had been Noelle's sponsor since her first month home. She was sixty-four, a retired corrections officer with a laugh you could hear across a church basement and sixteen years sober. In August, three weeks after Emery took the new job, her husband's knees had given out on the stairs of their row house in Lancaster and they had moved to a one-story place outside Columbus near their daughter.
"She's in Ohio," Noelle said.
"She has a phone in Ohio."
"I know she does." She looked at him. "She called me. Every Sunday. And I told her I was fine. I told her I was going to the Tuesday meeting, and I wasn't, because you're gone on Tuesdays now and there's nobody to stay with Linnie, and I didn't want to ask my mother because then I'd have to say why, and I didn't want to bring her to the church because—" She shook her head. "It doesn't matter. Those are reasons. They're all true and they're all just reasons. I stopped going to meetings in August. I stopped telling Rosario the truth in September. I stopped telling myself the truth on the Tuesday after your birthday. It's a staircase. It's always a staircase. I knew that. I've stood up in that church basement and said it out loud to other people."
He looked at the bottles on the table. He thought about August. He thought about the legal pad, and PROS and CONS, and her saying Take it, Em, we'll figure it out, and him not asking the next question, the one about Tuesdays. It had been there. It had been right there on the pad. He had looked at the PROS column and seen a bigger number.
"There's something else on your list," he said. He could see it at the bottom of the page, where the writing went bad. "What's that?"
She looked at it. She turned the paper around so he could read it.
It said, in letters that slanted downhill: He stopped asking.