"Every year since 2004," he said. "Too sour to eat. The birds like them."
"Good," said Ondine. "Good. I wondered."
There was a silence in the room then, a long one, with only the faint beeping of a monitor somewhere down the hall and the hum of the ventilation. Daria held her mother's hand. Ondine looked at the ceiling.
"I've been trying to think," Ondine said at last, "how to start. I've had thirty-three years to think how to start, and I've had five weeks to think since I mailed that card, and I still don't know. My head isn't good now. Things slide. I'm afraid that if I don't say it straight off, I'll lose it in the middle and never get it back. So I'm going to say it badly. Is that all right?"
"Whatever you want to say."
"Daria thinks I didn't cash your money because I hated you." She said this to the ceiling. "She's been very angry with me about it. She has a right to be. I want you to hear me say that first, in front of her, so she knows I know it. Daria, you have a right to be angry with me. I did a wrong thing to you, and I did it for thirty-one years, and I'd like to tell you why. I'd like him to hear it too, because it's partly his. Not the wrong thing. The why."
Daria's grip on her mother's hand tightened, but she did not say anything.
"I didn't hate you," Ondine said, turning her head on the pillow so she was looking at Bonner. "I wanted to. I worked very hard at it. The first year, I hated you so hard I made myself sick. That's true. But I couldn't keep it up, and the reason I couldn't keep it up was not that I'm a good person. It's that I had someone else to hate, and that one was closer."
Bonner did not move.
"Sully called me from Cherry Creek that night," Ondine said. "From the substation. They had a phone in the shed out there. It was ten-thirty, maybe a little after. He'd been out since five in the morning. He'd been working that line in the snow for eleven hours and he said, Onnie, I'm dead on my feet, I'm going to sleep in the truck out here and drive home when it's light. He said the heater in the truck was good. He said he had a blanket. And I said no."
Her voice did not break. It had been worn too smooth for breaking.
"Daria had an ear infection. She'd been screaming since dinner and she'd thrown up on me twice and I was twenty-six and I'd been alone with her since five in the morning too, and I was so tired, and I was so angry at him for being out there and not here, even though it was his job, even though it was what paid for the house. And I said, Sully, I need you to come home. I said it mean. I said, You can sleep when you get here, I haven't slept in two days. And he was quiet a minute and then he said, Okay, babe. I'm coming. And that was the last thing he ever said to me. Okay, babe. I'm coming."