The Coast Guard boys were getting up. I should have gone to the register. I didn't move, and after a second I saw Irja look down the room at me with her mouth in a straight line, and then come out from behind the register and take their check herself.
"He told the man at the feed store I'd started wandering," Edna said. "I found that out last month. He told the pastor. He told the girl who does my hair. He's telling everybody, very sadly, how his poor gramma is getting confused, how she says strange things, how she imagines people are stealing from her. So that when I say a single word, everybody will already know what to think of it." She touched the photo strip with one fingertip, just at the edge, as if it were hot. "And then this summer he started bringing your girl around. Ardith. No. I'm sorry. Jodie."
The name in her mouth went through me like cold water.
"She's lovely," Edna said. "She helped me shell peas on the porch in August. She told me all about her little brother and his baseball cards, and about you, how you've worked so hard. She calls you Mom like it's a whole sentence. And I watched him with her, and it was Longview again. All of it. The way he picks out her clothes for her. The way he tells her who her friends are. The way he talks about her mother." She stopped.
"What does he say about her mother?"
Edna looked at her hands. "That you're a hard woman. That you don't understand her. That you're jealous because your own marriage failed. That you'd throw her out on the street if you ever found out she was serious about him. That she can't trust you." She lifted her eyes. "He's said it in front of me a dozen times since July. Your mother's a hard woman, Jodie. Your mother would turn you out in the rain."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"I found that list last Thursday," Edna said. "In his jeans. Friday the fifteenth. J. Seven a.m. Money, Gramma's. Don't tell A. There's three dollars and twelve cents left in that bank, so I don't know what he means about money, unless he means the milk check, which comes on the fifteenth, which is why I suppose he picked the fifteenth. And Mike in Reno is a man he knew in Longview who parks cars for a casino, and I've heard him on the phone with him. He's taking her to Reno on Friday morning, Arlene. And I don't know what she thinks it is. I think she thinks it's a fresh start somewhere with sun. But I know what it is, because I've already seen it once. It's six hundred miles from her mother."
"I could have mailed it," Edna said. "I thought about that. I wrote your name on the envelope three times. But I thought, she'll open it standing at her mailbox in the rain, alone, and she'll think it's a crank. She'll think it's some crazy old woman, because by then that's what everybody will have told her I am. I thought she has to see my face. And I thought of the sheriff, too, I want you to know that. Deputy Ekstrom is her husband, the one at the bank. I sat in the truck outside the sheriff's office in Astoria for an hour on Friday and couldn't make myself go in. Because what was I going to tell him? That three years ago I lied, and now I'd like to un-lie, but only about the parts that suit me? And that I've got no proof my grandson took my money except my own word, and my word is worth whatever Darrell's already made it worth?" She shook her head. "So I came to the person who could still do something. Who it was still in time for."