"That's what she said."
"That's what you told me in 2017. When I wanted to blame my dad for everything. You said, You don't get to put down your end of the log just because somebody else was carrying it too." Hector laughed softly. "She sounds like you."
"She sounds better than me."
"Yeah, well. She had more practice. You only had thirty-two years."
He did not sleep much. He lay in the dark listening to trucks on Aultman Street and thinking about a phone in a shed at Cherry Creek, which he had never once thought about in thirty-three years, because he had never known it was there. He thought about a tired man saying Okay, babe, I'm coming. He thought about how a sentence like that could sit in a woman for a whole life, under everything, like a stone at the bottom of a stock tank, and how she had never once let it out, not even to the priest, and how she had let it out tonight, to him, because he was the only one who could not be hurt by hearing it. Or rather, because he was the only one who had already been hurt by it, in a way. It had been in his road too. He just hadn't known.
He found that he was not relieved. He had thought, in the room, for a moment, that he might be. That if some of the weight was hers, there would be less of it for him. But it did not work that way. Her stone did not make his any lighter. It just meant there were two of them at the bottom of the tank, and now each of them knew the other one was there. He did not know what that was worth. He thought it might be worth a great deal. He thought it might take him the rest of his life to find out.
At six in the morning he gave up, showered, packed his saddlebags, and walked his bike out of the Prospector lot so the engine would not wake anybody, and rode across to the Chevron for coffee, because he had said he would be there, and because some part of him, which he did not examine, wanted to be found in the place he had said.
He had been there twenty minutes, and had drunk the coffee, all of it, when the doors opened and a pink jacket came through them at a dead run.
Ludie stopped at the end of his booth, breathing hard. Her braid had been redone, tightly, by someone who had been angry while doing it. Behind her, more slowly, came Daria, in the same green fleece, carrying two coffees from the hospital cafeteria in a cardboard tray, as if she had not known whether he would be there and had bought a second one in case he was and a reason to drink it herself in case he wasn't.
"I'm grounded for two weeks," Ludie announced. "No tablet. And I have to apologize to Grandma for the page. I already did. She said she didn't remember it but she accepted my apology anyway, which Mom says is the most Grandma thing that has ever happened."
"That sounds fair," said Bonner.
"It's not fair. But it's okay." Ludie slid into the booth across from him without asking, exactly the way her mother had. "Grandma read your thing in her notebook this morning. She read it out loud. The part about the crabapple. She laughed."