"A friend. A man I sponsor."
"Of course you do." She drank. "Of course you sponsor someone. It's in the letters. Hector. That's the guy from the tire place. The one whose wife left."
"She came back."
"I know. October 2019. You wrote about it." She put the cup down. "Do you know how insane that is? That I know that? That I know Hector's wife came back? I didn't know my mother's middle name until I was in high school, because she didn't talk about anything, but I know that some tire guy in Winnemucca got his wife back."
He did not say anything.
"I'm going to tell you some things," Daria said. "And you're going to sit there and not be polite about it. Okay? Just let me say them."
"Okay."
"I don't remember him. My dad. I was two. I have pictures. I have one in my wallet where he's holding me on the hood of a Mt. Wheeler truck and I'm wearing his hard hat and it's covering my whole face. I've looked at that picture so many times I think I remember it, but I don't. I remember the picture." She took a breath. "My mom was twenty-six when he died. She had a two-year-old and a job at the county assessor's office and a house with a mortgage that he'd just signed. She kept the house. I don't know how. She worked at the assessor's during the day and did people's taxes at night and she sewed curtains for the motels on the weekends. I grew up under a table full of motel curtains. And she never got married again. She never even went on a date, that I know of. She just worked. And she was good to me, she was a good mom, she made every single basketball game, but she wasn't ever really there. You know? She was in the room. But there was always, like, a wall of glass."
Bonner nodded.
"And when I was in college, at UNR, my freshman year, the money ran out. Just ran out. She'd been paying out of savings and she'd thought it would last and it didn't, and I came home at Christmas and she told me. She cried. It was the only time I ever saw her cry about anything except him. So I didn't go back. I got a job at the Family Dollar and then at the Prospector, and then I had Ludie, and Ludie's dad was a whole other disaster, and I was twenty-four and living in my mom's sewing room with a baby, and I thought, Well, this is just how it goes for us. This is just the Ketterman luck. Something comes down the road at you in the dark."
She stopped. She had heard it as she said it.
"I'm sorry," she said, and then looked furious with herself for apologizing.
"Don't be."