Opal held her eyes for a moment longer and then nodded and got into her car, and she did not pull out of the lot until Kristen did.
Route 9 north of the city was four lanes for twenty minutes and then two lanes for an hour and a half, a road that ran past grain elevators and shuttered motels and church signs with sliding letters. Kristen had driven it a hundred times. She had driven it at twenty-two to pull Shelby, then fifteen and living under Kristen's roof and Kristen's rules, out of a party in a barn. She had driven it at twenty-six to sit beside Shelby in a hospital bed while Tanner was born, because Tanner's father had been in a bar in another county and would remain, in every way that mattered, in a bar in another county. She had driven it last Easter with a ham in a cooler and Brock asleep in the passenger seat, his big hand resting on her thigh.
He wasn't asleep now. He sat with the second phone in his lap, because she had tossed it there and told him to keep calling Shelby, and every four minutes he dialed and listened and lowered it again.
"Start at the beginning," Kristen said.
"Jolene called me on August ninth at about ten at night. I didn't know who she was. She said Shelby had overdosed and she'd brought her back with Narcan and Shelby wouldn't let her call an ambulance and wouldn't let her call you. She said Shelby was asking for me." He swallowed. "You were in the shower. I told you a client's kid was in the hospital and I was going to sit with them."
She remembered. She remembered thinking he was a good man for that. She had made him a thermos of coffee.
"I got there at midnight. Shelby was on the couch with a blanket. She looked—" He stopped. "You don't need what she looked like."
"I do, actually."
"She looked like me. Like I looked nine years ago. Grey. Sweating. Ashamed in that way where you can't even lift your head because you think if anyone sees your eyes they'll see all of it." He turned the phone over in his hands. "She said she'd hurt her back moving a dresser last winter. Got a prescription. Ran out. Found other ways. She said she'd been using for eight months and she'd hidden it from everybody, and then she said she knew I'd understand, because I was the only person in the family who'd ever been where she was. And then she said, If Kris finds out, she'll take Tanner."
The headlights caught a deer at the edge of the ditch, its eyes two green coins. Kristen slowed. It turned and leapt back into the dark.
"She said that."
"She said you told her you would. At Tanner's seventh birthday."
Kristen's hands tightened on the wheel. She remembered it with a clarity she didn't want: Shelby in the backyard with a plastic cup of wine that wasn't her first, laughing too loud, tripping over the cord of the bounce house while a dozen seven-year-olds bounced inside it. Kristen pulling her into the kitchen. Kristen's own voice, low and furious, a voice she had learned from nobody and from everybody, from being twelve and making dinner because their mother was asleep on the couch at four in the afternoon. If I ever see you like this around him again, I will call Dale's lawyer myself and I will take him. I swear to God, Shel.
Shelby had stopped drinking after that. Kristen had believed it was because of what she'd said. She had been, if she was honest, a little proud of it.