"Why didn't anyone tell me?" she said.
Irene closed her eyes.
"Your mother was going to," she said. "She was going to tell you when you were sixteen. She had a date picked." Irene opened her eyes. They were wet. "She didn't get to sixteen. She didn't get to see you turn thirteen. And then you came here, and I thought—I don't know what I thought, chickadee. I thought Russ would do it. I thought he would look at the two of you under one roof and he would finally be a man about it. I gave him eleven months."
"Did Mom—" Lucy stopped. Her throat had closed up. She tried again. "Did she want her? Paige? Did she want her back?"
Irene looked at her for a long time.
"Every single day," she said.
***
Russ Doyle's truck came up Larch Court at twenty past three, too fast for the snow, and slid the last ten feet into the driveway with its back end swinging. Lucy watched from the kitchen window. He got out without shutting the door. He was a big man with a reddish beard going gray and a Carhartt jacket with Doyle Supply stitched over the pocket, and he stood in the driveway with the snow on his bare head, looking at the house the way you might look at a dog you weren't sure would bite.
Then he came in through the garage, the back way, so that he would not have to walk through the mudroom.
Lucy noticed that. She would think about it later, that he came in the back way.
Dana met him in the hall. Lucy couldn't hear what they said; it was low and fast, Dana's voice mostly, his voice now and then, a rumble. Once she heard Dana say, clearly, "—told you, I told you a hundred times, when she moved in I said, Russ, that woman is going to—" and then something else, muffled. Then they came into the kitchen together, and Dana's eyes were red, and their father's face was the color of wet cement.
He looked at Irene first. Then at Lucy. Then at the coat, which Lucy had finally put down, folded over the back of one of the stools, though she kept one hand resting on it as if it might try to get up and leave.
"Irene," he said.
"Russell."
"You couldn't—" He stopped. He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. "Today? You picked today? It's her birthday in four days. You couldn't have called me. You couldn't have given me—"
"I gave you eleven months," Irene said. "I gave you fourteen years before that. How much more time did you want?"