And somewhere in the back of Renee's mind, in a room she did not go into often, a ledger had kept itself. Dana had made a choice. Renee had made one too. Renee had chosen the parent-teacher conferences and the orthodontist and the four a.m. drives to debate tournaments in Salem and Eugene and Bend. She had chosen the winter Nora had mono and couldn't keep down anything but lime Jell-O and Renee had slept on the floor of her room for nine nights. She had chosen the first period and the first broken heart and the forty-two drafts of the college essay, the one about the absent mother, the one Renee had proofread at the kitchen table at midnight and in which she did not appear at all.
That was fine, too. It was an essay about loss. Renee wasn't a loss. Renee was just there.
And then there had been one night, the winter Nora was twelve and had a fever of a hundred and three, when Renee had been sitting on the edge of the bed with a washcloth and Nora had opened her eyes and said, "Mom, I'm so cold." Just like that. Mom. And Renee had pulled the quilt up and said, "I know, baby, I know," and sat there until the Tylenol kicked in, and in the morning Nora had come down to breakfast pale and embarrassed and said, "Renee, can I stay home again?" with a little extra weight on the name, the way you'd set a glass down hard to make sure everyone heard it was empty. Neither of them had ever mentioned the fever night. Renee had carried it around for six years like a stone in her shoe that she had decided to call a pebble.
Now she stood in the empty gym and looked at the fifth chair.
She was not a fool. She understood instantly what the card meant, or at least the first layer of it. Nora had found out. Somehow, at some point, Nora had learned where her mother had been, or where she was now, and had decided, without telling anyone in the house she lived in, to invite her. To put her in the front row. Mother of the valedictorian.
And Renee understood the second layer, too, because she knew Dana Kessler's history the way you know the forecast for a town you'll never visit. Dana had been released from Coffee Creek nearly five years ago. Tom had told her that, too, the week it happened, standing at the kitchen sink with his back to her. Dana was out. Dana was living somewhere on the coast. Dana had not called, had not written, had not driven the however-many miles to knock on the door. Five years. Five birthdays. Five Christmases. Renee had watched Nora not get a card on every one of them.
She will not come, Renee thought. She will not come, and Nora is going to stand up there in front of two thousand people with this chair empty in the front row with a sign on it that says she wasn't wanted, and every person in this town who reads those cards on their way to their seats is going to know.
She did not decide to tear it. Later, when she tried to remember, she could not find the moment of deciding. She remembered setting the bouquet down on Ingrid's chair. She remembered peeling the tape off the back of the folding chair carefully, the way she would peel tape off a box of tulips so as not to bruise them, and then she remembered the sound. Cardstock is louder than you'd think. It tore once, crooked, through the word MOTHER, and then again, and she was holding four pieces in her hand, and she was breathing as if she'd climbed a hill.
"Well," said a voice behind her. "There it is."
Ingrid Lindqvist stood in the aisle in her good wool coat, the navy one she wore to funerals and christenings, with rain still beaded on the shoulders. She was seventy-four, widowed by the river forty years ago, and she had the face of someone who had stopped being surprised by the weather.
"Ingrid," Renee said. "I didn't hear you."