"She was funny," he said. "She was the funniest person I ever met."
They moved in together over the hardware store a year later. He worked downstairs for old Hanlon, learning the business. She waitressed at the Lake Aire and took night classes at the tech college. Then she got pregnant, and it was a surprise, and they were scared, but they were happy. They were going to get married in the spring.
"She bought that coat for it," Irene said quietly. "At a consignment shop in Minneapolis. She said she was going to get married in a green coat in the snow like a crazy person."
"We never did," Russ said. "We never got to the spring."
Paige was born on December ninth. Seven pounds, two ounces. Winnie carried her home inside the green coat. And then, Russ said, something went wrong.
He did not have good words for what went wrong. He kept saying she wasn't herself. Irene, beside him, said the words for him, in a voice like someone reading a diagnosis off a chart. Postpartum depression. Severe. Nobody caught it. Nobody was looking. In 2009 in Chippewa County nobody looked at a twenty-two-year-old waitress with a colicky baby and saw anything but a girl who was tired. Winnie stopped sleeping. Then she stopped eating. Then, around the time Paige was five months old, she started drinking, a little at first, wine in a coffee mug, and then more.
"She never hurt her," Irene said. "I want that said. Whatever else. She never laid a finger on that baby."
"No," Russ said. "She never did. But one night in August—" He stopped. He looked at the pie. "One night in August I came up from closing the store and the baby was screaming in her crib and Win wasn't in the apartment. I found her two hours later. She was sitting in the car in the Kwik Trip parking lot with the engine off. Just sitting there. She said she'd gone out for diapers and she couldn't remember how to come back. She said she couldn't remember which way was home."
Nobody said anything. The farmhouse clock ticked.
"I got scared," he said. "I was twenty-five years old and I got scared out of my mind. I called my mother. My mother called a lawyer." His mouth twisted. "So I filed for custody. Emergency custody. And Win was in no shape to fight it. She was in a facility in Menomonie by then. The judge looked at the papers and that was that."
"And you met Dana," Irene said.
Russ glanced up at his wife. Dana had taken her hands away from her mouth. She stood very straight, like someone facing a firing squad, and when she spoke her voice was low and clear.
"I worked in his mother's dentist's office," she said. "I was the receptionist. He brought Paige in one day because his mother was babysitting and had an appointment, and the baby was crying in the waiting room, and I picked her up." Dana looked at Lucy, which Lucy did not expect. She looked straight at her. "She stopped crying. That's all. She just stopped, and she put her hand on my face, and she looked at me. She was ten months old. Do you understand? She looked at me like she knew me."
"Dana," Russ said.
"No. I want to say it. If we're saying everything, I want to say it." Dana's eyes were full but nothing spilled over. "I married him when she was twenty months old. I was twenty-nine. I had already been told I couldn't have my own. And here was this little girl, and she needed somebody, and her mother was—" She stopped herself. "Her mother was gone. That's what we were told. That's what everybody said. Gone, sick, not coming back. And I was there. I was there at three a.m. with the ear infections. I was there when she got her tubes in. I was there when she said her first sentence. You want to know what it was? It was, Mama, look, snow. She said it to me."