"Five years," Renee said. "You've been out five years. Tom told me. You're ten minutes away. Why didn't you—"
"Because I promised."
"Promised Tom."
"Yes."
"Promised him what? He said the same word in there. He said, she promised. He went white as a sheet when he saw your name. I've been married to that man seven years and I've never once seen him look like that." Renee turned in the seat to face her. "What did you promise him, Dana? What kind of promise does a mother make to stay away from her own daughter?"
"The kind you make in a visiting room at the Clatsop County jail," Dana said, "with your public defender out in the hallway."
On the radio, scattered applause. Someone at a microphone began listing scholarship recipients.
Renee said, "I don't understand."
Dana looked out the windshield at the blur of rain and cars and the low brick shape of the high school. Her hands were in her lap, chapped red, the knuckles thick, the hands of someone who stood on a processing line ten hours a day in cold water. "Ask him," she said. "It's his to tell. That was part of it."
But Renee had spent eight years on the far side of a door that wasn't hers to open, and she had just stood in a gymnasium and watched a girl she loved look through her like a window, and she found that she had run out of the patience that had always passed, in her, for goodness.
"He said you were drinking," she said slowly. "He said you were driving home from a party and you'd been drinking and you hit a boy on a bicycle. That's what he told me, in his truck, on Pier 39, the summer I met him." She watched Dana's face. "He's never told it again. Not once in eight years. And I never asked. I thought I was being kind." Her voice dropped. "Were you driving?"