She looked at the coat in Lucy's arms. At the place over Lucy's heart where, inside, a name was stitched.
"She's lying," Paige said. "Your grandma. She's confused, or she's—she's old, she's mixing stuff up. She's never liked us. Everybody knows that."
Lucy didn't say anything.
"My mom is my mom," Paige said. "I brought my birth certificate to the DMV for my permit. It says Dana Doyle." Her voice cracked and she turned away from the kid's face, which was doing something she couldn't stand to look at. It was doing pity. "She's lying," Paige said again, to the blue wall.
But she was thinking of something she had not thought of in years, something so small she had folded it up and put it in the back of a drawer in her head.
She was nine. She was in the bathroom at her grandma Doyle's house in Rice Lake, at Easter, and her aunt Kim's voice had come through the heating vent from the kitchen below. You can't keep it from her forever, Dana. She's going to find out. Kids always find out. And her mother's voice, flat and hard in a way Paige had never heard before: She's not going to find out because there's nothing to find out. She's mine. And then someone had turned on the mixer and Paige had flushed the toilet and gone back downstairs, and when she asked her mother in the car on the way home what Aunt Kim meant, her mother said, Oh, Kim thinks I should tell you that you were a surprise baby, isn't that silly, and laughed, and turned up the radio.
She had believed it. She had been nine.
***
The Doyle kitchen had a big island with a white quartz top and three stools, and a window over the sink that looked out on a swing set shin-deep in snow. Irene had taken the pie out of its box and set it in the center of the island. The lattice was golden, a little darker at the edges. One cherry had bubbled up through a gap and burned to a glossy black jewel. She had set the pie server beside it and three small plates, and then she had sat down on a stool and folded her hands on the quartz and not touched any of it.
Lucy came in first. She was still holding the coat. She stood by the refrigerator with it bundled against her and looked at her grandmother, and Irene looked back, and something in the old woman's face crumpled for just a second and then reassembled itself.
"Come here, chickadee," Irene said.
Lucy came. Irene put an arm around her, coat and all, and Lucy leaned into the maroon parka, which was cold and wet on the outside and still smelled of the Buick's heater.
"I didn't mean for it to be like this," Irene said into the top of her head. "I want you to know that. I came here to eat pie with you and talk about your science project. That's all I came for."
"Is it true?" Lucy said into the parka.
Irene didn't answer right away. Over Lucy's head, she watched Paige come into the kitchen doorway and stop there, one hand on the frame, as if the room had a fence around it only she could see.
"Is what true?" Irene said, carefully. She wanted the girl to say it. She did not know why, exactly. Maybe because she had been the only one saying it, in her own head, for so long.