Renee looked at the folder and then away from it, the way you look away from someone undressing.
They sat there. The rain sheeted down the windshield and the world outside turned to moving glass.
"I tore it up," Renee said finally. "The card. With your name. I'm the reason your chair's empty. I want you to know that before you decide whether to talk to me."
Dana turned her head and looked at her.
"It's not empty because of you," she said. "It's empty because I'm sitting out here."
"I didn't think you'd come. I thought she was going to look down at that chair and—" Renee stopped. "That's what I told myself. It's not the whole thing."
"What's the whole thing?"
Renee had not told the whole thing to anyone. She had not told it to herself in words. She found that it was easier to say to a stranger in a fish-smelling truck in the rain than it would have been to say to anyone she loved.
"It said mother," she said. "And mine didn't say anything. I've been in that house for eight years. I've done every single thing a mother does and she has never once called me that, not once, not when she meant it. And there was your name on a card in the front row with the word on it. And you hadn't even sent her a birthday card in five years." She heard her own voice crack and kept going anyway. "I hated you. I need you to know that, too. I have hated you for eight years and it's the easiest thing I've ever done. You were the mother who left. I was the mother who stayed. That was the whole arrangement. It was the only thing that made me feel like I'd earned anything."
Dana was quiet for a long time.
"That's fair," she said at last. "I'd have hated me."