"She knew. And she let me take it. And she paid me, in a way, to keep taking it, I guess. To keep it out of that house." Ruthann looked at him then, straight on. "I've thought about that ten dollars a lot. I used to think it was hush money. Now I think it might have been the only thing she could figure out how to do. In that house. With that man." She picked the iron back up. "I'm not telling you that so you'll feel sorry for anybody. I'm telling you because you've been carrying this around like it's just about you and Shug. It's never just about the two people who are standing there."
He sat with it, the way she had asked. He thought about the upstairs window. He thought about the Kettlemans' kitchen, which he had sat in two days a week for years, with its clean counters and its quiet and its clock that ticked so loud you could hear it from the den, and how he had never once, in all those summers, heard anybody in that house laugh.
"You were scared of them," he said finally. "Weren't you. Of losing the job."
"Of course I was."
"I was scared of them too. That's why I never said anything. Since I was nine. I thought if I said anything to Shug, they'd fire you."
Ruthann set the iron down again, very slowly. She looked at him for a long time, and her eyes got bright, and she pressed her lips together.
"Oh, honey," she said. "Oh, no. Is that what you thought? All this time?"
He nodded. He could not quite speak.
She came around the ironing board and put her arms around him, which she did not do often, because she was not a hugging kind of woman and he was not a hugging kind of boy, and she held on for a while and smelled like spray starch and the plant.
"I would have scrubbed toilets at the bus station before I let you carry that," she said into his hair. "You hear me? Never again. You don't ever hold your tongue on my account. Not ever. I can take care of the light bill."
"Okay," he said.
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She let go and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and went back to the ironing, and neither of them said anything else about it that night. But when he went to bed, he lay awake a long