She pulled on the other glove.
"I'm not going to the lawyer," Irene said. "Lucy needs her father, God help her, and he's the one she's got. And Paige will be seventeen on Wednesday. A year after that she can do whatever she wants. She doesn't need me to fight for her. She needs somebody to tell her the truth, and I've done that now, and the rest is hers." Irene picked up her purse from the bench. "But I'll be here in two weeks. Two o'clock. And I'm going to knock, and you're going to open the door. And if Paige wants to come down and have pie with me and her sister, she's going to be allowed to. That's all I want. That's the whole list."
Dana didn't answer. But she didn't say no.
Irene reached into her purse, and took out an envelope, and held it out.
It was old. The paper had gone soft at the corners, and someone had written on the front in looping, swooping green ink, a hand that matched the stitching in the coat. Paige, it said. Just that. And underneath, smaller: 17.
"She wrote one every year," Irene said. "From the first year. I have the rest at home, in a hatbox. This is the one she wrote last December. For this year. She always wrote them a year ahead, in case." Irene's voice faltered for the first time all afternoon, and she cleared her throat and made it work again. "I'm not going to put it in Paige's hand myself. I'm giving it to you. You're her mother. You decide."
Dana stared at the envelope. She didn't reach for it.
Irene set it down on the bench beneath the coat rack, beside the spot where the pie box had been. Then she opened the glass-paned door and went out into the snow, and closed it behind her, and Dana stood alone in the blue mudroom and listened to the Buick start, cough, catch, and pull slowly away from the curb, hazards blinking, though it wasn't dark yet and there was nobody on the road.
***
Russ went out to sit in his truck at six fifteen and did not come back in.
Lucy saw him from the window of the den. The engine was running, and the dome light was off, and he was just sitting there behind the wheel in the dark with the snow piling up on the windshield, not turning on the wipers. She thought about going out to him. She thought about knocking on the window, the way she used to knock on his window when he pulled up on Wednesdays, two knocks and then a third, their signal. She didn't go. She didn't know what she would say, and she didn't know, anymore, which parts of the Wednesdays had been real.
Some of them, probably. The time he taught her to back the truck out of the Culver's lot and she hit a snowbank and he laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes. You couldn't fake that kind of laughing.
She didn't forgive him. She didn't know if she would.
Dana was in the kitchen. She had wrapped the pie in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator, untouched, and then she had sat down at the island and opened her laptop and stared at the accounts spreadsheet without typing anything for forty-five minutes. When Lucy walked past the doorway, Dana looked up, and Lucy had seen something in Dana's face she had not seen before in eleven months. Not kindness. Not an apology. Recognition. The look of somebody who has just figured out that the thing they've been afraid of is already in the house, and has been for a long time, and is thirteen years old and wearing a speckled sweater.
"There's soup," Dana had said. "If you want. I can heat some up."