"Your son got into Howard."
"He did."
"Then that's what we're talking about the rest of the way," said Eunice Turner, and they did.
Lindsay took the 6:12 home and walked up the hill in the long April light. Pete was on the porch steps with two beers, looking at the new roof, which had cost more than either of them wanted to talk about.
She sat beside him and told him about the poinsettia and the lemon oil and the chair.
"Did she forgive you?" he asked.
"No."
He handed her a beer. "How do you feel?"
Lindsay thought about it for a long time. Down the hill, the river had gone silver. She thought of Kyra's green ink, They count. She thought of Rosa Castillo's cousin, who had called in March and whose trucking company had been engaged in five weeks, on the same terms as anyone. She thought of the bottom drawer of a desk by an office whose door had a different name on it now, and of the requisition she had filed that afternoon for lemon oil, which would take three weeks, and which she had filed anyway.
"Like I know her name," she said.