"It was Mom's," he said. "It's mine now." He opened his eyes. "Not here, Lark. Please. Not in front of the whole— Not here."
He picked up his briefcase. I picked up my box of quilts from where the woman with the toddler had nudged it to the edge of the line, and she gave me a look of pure, uncomplicated sympathy, a stranger's look, and said, "You want me to watch it?" and I said, "No, thank you," and carried it out into the rain behind my brother with the old man's cap balanced on the top of it.
I looked for Virgil Haberle in the parking lot. I couldn't help it. The rain was coming in hard off the lake in long gray sheets, and across Twenty-sixth Street I could see the glass bus shelter, and in it a figure in a brown coat sitting on the bench with his head bowed and his cane between his knees. Just sitting. Getting rained on even inside the shelter, because the wind was blowing straight through it.
"Get in the car," Eamon said.
His car was a gray Honda Accord, very clean, with a parking pass for the county courthouse hanging from the mirror. I put the quilts in the back seat and got in the passenger side and he got in the driver's side and we shut the doors and the sound of the rain went from a roar to a drumming, and the windshield fogged over almost at once from our breath, and he did not turn on the engine. We sat in the gray fog like two people in a cloud.
"How long?" I said.
He knew what I meant. "Since he got out. November of oh-nine."
"Every month?"
"Every month. Two hundred and four, counting today." He was staring at the fogged windshield as if he could see through it. "The first few came to the house. Mom didn't want them at the house. She didn't want you to find one. So she rented a box here, and she wrote to his parole officer, and the parole officer gave him the box number. And then they came here."
"Two hundred and four," I said. "Ten thousand dollars."
"Ten thousand, two hundred."