"Cedar Hollow called again. They've notified the sheriff as a courtesy, but she's not a missing person. She's a grown woman who left a voluntary program." Jolene's mouth thinned. "I asked the deputy what the difference was between a grown woman who left a voluntary program and a missing person, and he said about seventy-two hours."
The kitchen was yellow and warm and smelled like coffee and the orchids that crowded every windowsill, a dozen of them in mismatched pots, pale purple and white and one a startling speckled green. At the table, under a hanging lamp, a nine-year-old boy in dinosaur pajamas that were too short at the ankle was bent over a scatter of puzzle pieces. He looked up, and his whole face opened.
"Aunt Kris!"
He came around the table and hit her at the waist the way he had since he was two, full speed, no braking. She held on. He smelled like Jolene's lavender soap and peanut butter and boy. He was taller than at Easter. She could feel his shoulder blades through the thin pajama shirt.
"Hey, bug."
"Did Mom call you? Is she coming home early?" He pulled back to look at her. "Jolene said she's at a special hospital for her back. She said Uncle Brock drove her. I made her a bracelet and she made me one." He held up his wrist. Red and blue thread, knotted unevenly. "She said she'd be home on the twenty-first. That's eight days."
Kristen looked at Jolene over his head. Jolene gave a tiny shake of the head: that's all he knows.
"I'm just visiting," Kristen said. "Mom's— there's some stuff with the hospital tonight, so I came up to help Jolene. Okay? Nothing for you to fix."
"Okay." He studied her with Shelby's eyes, wide-set and grey-green and much too old. "Are you sad?"
"I drove a long way," she said. "I'm tired. Show me the puzzle."
She sat with him for ten minutes, because she could not think of anything she could do in the next ten minutes that would matter more. The puzzle was a lighthouse, or would be. Tanner explained his system, which involved sorting by color first and then by the shape of the knobs, and he talked about school and about a kid named Bryce who could burp the alphabet and about Jolene's orchids, which he watered on Tuesdays and Saturdays, never more, because Jolene said more water was how you killed them.
"You love them too much and they drown," Tanner said gravely. "That's what she says."
From the doorway, Jolene made a soft sound and turned away.
When Tanner finally agreed to lie down on Jolene's couch with a cartoon on low, Kristen followed Jolene out onto the back porch. Brock stayed inside, on a kitchen chair, dialing.