And he drove Jodie places. That's the part I'm not proud of. In 1982 I worked six days a week, and the Pinto was a dice roll every morning, and when a young man with a clean car and a job history and good manners offered to drive my daughter to school and her job at the Dairy Queen and home again at night, some tired part of me said thank God and didn't ask anything else.
But by October there were things. Small things, the kind of things you set to one side because if you picked them up you'd have to look at them. Jodie had quit the yearbook staff, which she'd loved, because Darrell said the adviser looked at her funny. She'd stopped calling her friend Shelley, who she'd known since kindergarten, because Darrell said Shelley was jealous. She wore a sweater one warm Saturday in September and said she was cold. And she'd started talking about after graduation in a way that didn't include the community college in Astoria, or the dental assistant program in Portland we'd sent away for the brochure for, or anything at all except Darrell and a place in Reno where a cousin of his could get him on at a casino, parking cars, and how the sun shone there three hundred days a year. "Three hundred days, Mom," she said, standing at the kitchen window watching our rain. "Can you imagine?"
I could imagine. That was the trouble. I'd been seventeen once, and I'd married Keith Hakala at nineteen, the summer after the storm, because he had a car and a laugh and he made the rain seem like somebody else's problem. I knew exactly what she was imagining.
That's what I was thinking about at a quarter to eleven, wiping down the pie case, when the bell over the door jangled and the old woman came in out of the weather.
She came in the way people come in from that kind of rain, sideways, shouldering the door, and then she stood on the mat and dripped. She was small, not much over five feet, and she had on a man's coat, an old brown canvas work coat with a corduroy collar, much too big for her, the sleeves rolled twice at the wrist. On her head was one of those clear plastic rain bonnets that tie under the chin, the kind they used to give away free at the beauty shop, and under it her hair was white and set in tight curls that the wet had started to undo. She had on men's rubber boots, the kind with the red line around the top that dairymen wear. She carried a black handbag over her arm the old-fashioned way, crooked in her elbow, and she held it pressed against her side like it had something alive in it.
"Good morning," I said. "Sit anywhere you like. It's not exactly standing room only."
She looked down the row of booths, and there was something in the way she looked that I noticed even then, though I didn't know what it meant. She didn't look at them the way a stranger looks at a room, deciding. She looked like someone checking that the furniture was still where she'd left it. Then she walked down past Eino, past the jukebox, past the coat hooks, to the fifth booth, the one by the window with the crack in the vinyl that Toivo had patched with red electrical tape, and she sat down on the side facing the door and set her handbag on the table in front of her and put both hands flat on top of it.
I brought her a menu and a glass of water and the coffee pot, because nobody who came in out of that day didn't want coffee. She untied the rain bonnet with fingers so stiff with cold it took her three tries, and folded it in half and in half again and put it in the pocket of the big coat. Up close she was older than I'd thought, seventy-five at least, with a fine, soft face gone to wrinkles like tissue paper that's been folded too many times, and very pale blue eyes, and a little silver cross on a chain at her throat. She smelled of rain and cows and, under that, Jergens lotion. Her hands were red and swollen at the knuckles.
"Coffee?" I said.