"And this whole time," Daria went on, lower, "the whole time I was under the table and at the Family Dollar and in the sewing room, there was this money in her closet. Thirty-one thousand, two hundred and sixty dollars. I added it up. It took me all Sunday night. Thirty-one thousand, two hundred and sixty dollars, and every one of them had a letter folded around it, and every one of the letters had been opened, and read, and folded back up exactly along the same lines. Some of them so many times the folds are soft. Like cloth. Like she read them over and over. She didn't spend your money. She just read your letters, for thirty-one years. And she never once talked to me about my father."
Her voice had dropped almost to nothing. A trucker two booths down looked over and then quickly away.
"Do you know what that feels like?" Daria said. "To find out your mother had a whole relationship with the man who killed your dad, and you weren't invited?"
"It wasn't a relationship," Bonner said quietly. "She never wrote back. Not once. Until five weeks ago."
"It was a relationship. It was the longest relationship she ever had. You wrote to her every month for thirty-one years and she read every word. That's more than she ever did with anyone else. That's more than she did with me."
He looked at his hands on the table. They were scarred and spotted, and the left wrist still did not turn all the way, not since 1993.
"I didn't know," he said. "If I'd known she wasn't using it, I'd have stopped sending it to her. I'd have found some other way to get it to you. I swear that to you."
"I believe you," Daria said, surprising them both. "That's the worst part. I believe you. I read thirty-one years of you. You're not a liar. You're a lot of things but you're not that." She drank the rest of the coffee in one long swallow and set the cup down. "She's awake. She's been asking. She's not confused right now, she's very clear, scarily clear, and she asked Miss Gaudet three times where you were, and Miss Gaudet finally told her I sent you away, and my mother looked at me." Daria shut her eyes. "My mother hasn't looked at me like that since I was sixteen and took the car to Elko without asking. She said, Daria Jean, I'm sick, I'm not stupid. And then she said, I've been waiting thirty-three years to say one thing to that man, and if you make me die without saying it, I will haunt you, and I will be very boring about it."
Bonner, despite everything, nearly laughed.
"Yeah," said Daria. "That's her. That's what she's like when she's all there." She slid out of the booth and stood. "Visiting hours ended at seven. Miss Gaudet says she'll let you in anyway if I'm with you. I'm going to be with you. I'm going to be in that room the whole time. And if she gets upset, if she gets tired, if anything, you're leaving. No discussion."
"No discussion," he agreed.
He left a twenty on the table for a seven-dollar bill, and the Basque woman, watching from behind the counter, raised her eyebrows at him and then nodded once, as if she had been following the whole thing and approved of the outcome so far.
They walked across Aultman Street together in the near dark. Daria walked a little ahead of him, and he let her.