Renee had her hand over her mouth.
"I thought I knew what would happen," Dana said. "That's the part I can't get past, even now. I thought I was being smart. First offense. I'd had three glasses of wine, I'd blow over but not by much, I was a mom with no record and a kid at home. I thought probation. I thought, maybe, a few months in county, a suspended license, community service, everybody in town knowing. I thought I could carry that. I was sure I could carry that better than he could." She almost smiled. "I didn't know anything about Measure Eleven. Nobody does until it happens to them. The DA charged it as assault two. Recklessly causing serious physical injury with a dangerous weapon. A car's a dangerous weapon. Seventy months, mandatory. The judge said in open court she didn't like it and didn't have a choice."
"Why didn't you tell them?" Renee said. "When you knew it was seventy months. Why didn't you just tell them the truth?"
"Because by then I'd lied to a deputy and signed a statement and given a recorded interview. Because if I took it back, they'd have charged Tom with everything and me with false reporting and hindering on top of it, and our daughter would have had two parents in prison instead of one, and gone to live with her grandmother at sixty-four on a widow's pension. My lawyer laid it all out for me on a legal pad, both columns. And Tom came to see me in that visiting room in the county jail and put his head down on the table and cried like a child, and he said he'd quit drinking, he'd never touch it again, he'd give her everything, she'd never want for anything. And he has. That's the thing, Renee. He kept his part. He hasn't had a drink in ten years and seven months. You know that better than I do."
Renee did know it. She had married a man who drank club soda with lime at weddings and went to a meeting in the basement of the Lutheran church on Tuesday nights and never said a word about why. She had thought it was before her time, a private thing, something to honor by leaving it alone.
"And the promise," Renee said.
"The first part was mine. I asked him not to tell her where I was. I didn't want her to grow up visiting her mother through a glass. I'd seen those kids in the visiting room at Coffee Creek, the little ones, the way they got patted down. I didn't want that for her. That was me. That's on me." Dana's jaw worked. "I didn't know he'd turn it into she left. I found out later. I found out from Ingrid."
"Ingrid," Renee said.
"She came to see me at Coffee Creek. Once a month. Five years and ten months, a two-hour drive each way down 26 in that old Buick, and she never missed one, not in snow, not when she had her hip done. She never asked me anything. She'd sit there with her coffee and tell me everything Nora did. What she was reading. Her teeth. Her grades." Dana turned and looked at Renee, really looked at her, for the first time. "You. She told me about you."
Renee could not speak.
"The flower shop. The way you braided Nora's hair for school picture day when she was ten because Tom didn't know how and she'd been going in with it in her face. The debate tournaments. The mono. Nine nights on the floor. Lime Jell-O." Dana's mouth twisted. "You want to know what I did, the day Ingrid told me about the mono? I went back to my unit and lay on my bunk and was so jealous of you I couldn't see. I hated you so much I thought I'd be sick. And then I was so grateful to you I couldn't see either. I don't think I've ever stopped being both. So you're not the only one."