Toivo nodded slowly. "I'd never have fired you for a coffee pot," he said. "You should've put it down and got under there with both hands." He straightened up and patted the roof of the car twice, the way you'd pat a horse, and went back inside.
I didn't understand what he meant until I was halfway across the bridge.
The Astoria-Megler Bridge in a southwest blow is not a place for thinking, but I thought anyway. You climb the big corkscrew curve up off the Astoria end, two hundred feet over the water, and the wind hits a little car like a shoulder hitting a door. The Pinto shuddered and wandered in the lane and I held the wheel at ten and two with both hands. Then you come down off the high span onto the long low part, three miles of it, just a few feet over the river, two lanes and a rail and nothing else, and the rain comes at the windshield black and the headlights only go out about as far as you can spit. Edna sat with her handbag in her lap and her hands folded on it and didn't say anything for a long time.
Then she said, "He kicked the jukebox. Eino's right. He used to kick it when it didn't play his song. I'd forgotten that."
"Edna," I said. "Did you know? When he was little. Did you know?"
She looked out at the dark where the river was. "I knew he was frightened," she said. "And I knew frightened children grow up one of two ways. I thought if I loved him enough he'd grow up the other way." She was quiet. "That isn't how it works. I know that now. I should have known it in seventy-nine. The love doesn't stop it. The love just gives it somewhere to hide."
The wind leaned on us. I thought about the dent in the plaster in my hallway in Uniontown, behind the calendar from Huhta's Sandbar Cafe that I hung there every January, a new one every year for seven years, in exactly the same spot. I thought about the night in 1975 when Keith came home from the Elks with the Christmas bonus gone, and Jodie was ten and asleep, and Petey was three and asleep, and I said one word about the money, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the floor of the hall with the back of my head ringing and a hole in the wall above me the shape of my skull. And how I'd left him three weeks later, and how I'd told Jodie, when she asked, that her daddy and I had just grown apart. That's what I'd told everybody. Grown apart. Because Keith Hakala was her father, and she loved him, and he sent her a stuffed Kodiak bear every birthday, and I thought it was the decent thing. I thought it was what a good mother did, to keep a thing like that from breaking in her daughter's hands. I'd held that pot for seven years and never once put it down.
And so my daughter had grown up in a house with a hole in the hallway wall and no idea what it was. She had no idea what it looked like when it started. She had no idea a man could be sweet to you and fix your porch steps and bring you chrysanthemums with the price peeled off and still be that. Nobody had ever told her. I'd made very sure nobody ever told her.