"Mostly I'm sorry," Jolene said. "And a recipe for baked ziti. Which is a strange thing to put in an apology. But it's a good recipe. It's the one Shelby makes."
Shelby came out of the brick building with a duffel bag and a thirty-day coin in her fist and, true to her word, held it up for her sister to see. Kristen looked at it for a long moment. It was bronze and slightly dinged and lighter than she'd expected. She gave it back.
On the drive home, Shelby told Tanner the real thing. She did it in the back seat, with Jolene's car pulled into the empty lot of the Hollis Dollar General, because she said she didn't want to do it at home where he'd always remember the room. She told him it wasn't her back. She told him she'd gotten sick from medicine that was supposed to help her and that she'd lied about it because she was ashamed, and that Aunt Kris and Uncle Brock and Jolene had all helped, and that she was getting better but it would take a long time and there might be bad days. Tanner listened with his serious grey-green eyes and then asked if this was the same as Grandma, because Aunt Kris had told him once that Grandma had been sick from drinking.
"Kind of," Shelby said. "It's kind of the same."
"Grandma died," Tanner said.
"I know, bug."
"Are you going to die?"
Shelby looked at the window, and then she looked at him. "I'm going to try really hard not to," she said. "And I'm going to tell you the truth, from now on, even when it's scary. That's my promise. Not that nothing bad will happen. Just that I'll tell you."
Tanner thought about it for a long time. Then he said, "Okay," and held out his wrist, and she held out hers, and they touched their thread bracelets together like a toast.
Kristen, in the passenger seat, turned to look out the windshield so no one would see her face. Jolene reached over without a word and handed her a peppermint, the kind Opal carried in every pocket. Opal had given Jolene a whole bag at the gas station, Kristen learned later, the morning Kristen drove up to fetch Shelby home, because Opal had insisted on coming along as far as the county line to make sure the tires were good. The tires had been fine. Opal had known that. She had come anyway.
They did not have Thanksgiving together. It was too soon, and everyone knew it, and nobody pretended otherwise. Kristen ate turkey sandwiches at Opal's with Opal's husband and two noisy teenagers, and Brock ate at his brother's, and Shelby and Tanner ate at Jolene's, and at four o'clock all three of them called each other in a confused round robin and nobody got through to anybody for twenty minutes, and when Shelby finally reached her she was laughing so hard she couldn't talk. It was not a good Thanksgiving. It was not a bad one either. It was the first one in years where nobody was hiding anything, and Kristen found that this felt less like peace than like being outdoors in weather, exposed and awake.
In December, on a Thursday, Ferris Quaid asked Kristen whether she had forgiven her husband. She said no. He asked whether she had forgiven her sister, and she thought about it for a long time and said that she was further along with Shelby, and she didn't entirely know why. Brock said he did. He said it was because Shelby had hidden something about herself, and he had hidden something about Kristen, from Kristen, in her own house. Ferris Quaid nodded slowly and wrote something down and said that was one of the more useful things anyone had said in that room all year.
In the second week of January, Brock moved back in. Not into their bedroom. Into the small room at the end of the hall that had been an office and a junk room and, for one hopeful month two years ago, a place they had talked about painting a soft color. He brought a single duffel bag and a box of books. He asked her, at the door, whether this was all right, and she said it was what they had agreed to try, and he said that wasn't what he'd asked, and she said, "I know. It's all right. For now it's all right."