He told it all. He told it badly, out of order, the bourbon and the curve and the boy in the black hoodie and the sound, and his old DUII from when he was twenty-six, and the license, and the passenger seat, and the visiting room in the county jail where he had put his head down on the table. He did not make it smaller than it was. Renee would think about that later, when she was trying to decide how much of the man she'd married was the man she'd thought she'd married: that when it finally came out of him, he didn't flinch from any of it. He didn't say, I was in shock. He didn't say, she offered. He said, "I let her. I let her do it. And then I let her do seventy months. And when she got out I told her to stay away from you, and I told myself it was for your sake, and it was for mine."
Nora had not moved. Her arms were still folded. Her face was the courtroom face, and then, as he talked, it wasn't anymore.
"You told me she left," she said. "Not went away. Left. You told me she chose."
"Yes."
"Why? Why that word?"
Tom looked at the floor. "Because when I said she went away, you kept asking when she was coming back," he said. "Every night. For three years. And I couldn't stand it. When I said she left, you stopped asking." His voice cracked down the middle. "It was easier for me. That's the only reason. There isn't a better one. I made you think your mother didn't want you because I couldn't stand to hear you ask for her."
Nora turned around and walked to the bleachers and sat down on the bottom row, next to her grandmother, and put her face in her hands. Ingrid put one arm around her and kept it there. She didn't say anything. Renee, watching, understood that the old woman had been holding this, too, all this time, the whole weight of it, every month on Highway 26 in the old Buick, and had never set it down in front of anyone.
"Did you know, Grandma?" Nora said through her hands.
"I knew the way you know weather," Ingrid said. "I knew my son. I knew he'd been drinking that year. I knew Dana never drove that car home from anywhere in her life if he was in it." She looked over Nora's head at Tom, and her face was terrible in its sorrow. "I never asked him. I asked myself what it would do to you to have both of them gone, and I didn't ask. I went and sat with her instead. That's what I did. I don't know if it was right."
"I'm calling the Board on Monday," Tom said.