That's what Toivo meant. I'm almost sure. He'd been in my house exactly once, for Petey's christening, in 1972, three years before the hole. But Toivo had a way of knowing things.
Signe Nygaard's house was a little gray box by the boat basin in Ilwaco, with a porch light on and the curtain twitching. She was tiny and fierce, in a quilted robe and a hearing aid that whistled, and she came out onto the porch in the rain in her slippers and took her sister's face in both her hands and said something to her in Finnish, very loud, and Edna said something back, and Signe looked over Edna's shoulder at me with her mouth working, and then she said, in English, at the top of her voice, "It isn't her hip, is it?"
"No, ma'am," I said.
"I didn't think so," Signe said. "She walks fine." And she took Edna inside.
Edna stopped in the door. She turned around in the yellow porch light in that big brown coat and looked at me, and for a second I thought she was going to say thank you, and I didn't want her to. I think she knew that.
"Keep it," she said. "All of it. The passbook too. If you go to the sheriff, I'll say what I have to say. I'll tell them about Longview. I don't care what they do to me. I'm seventy-four." She held on to the door frame. "But Arlene. Don't make it about you. When you talk to her. That's what I did wrong with him, all his life. I made it about me. What I couldn't bear. What I couldn't lose." And she went inside, and Signe shut the door, and I sat in the Pinto in the rain in Ilwaco with the engine running and the envelope on the seat beside me where she'd been.
It was a quarter to nine when I got home. The light was on in the kitchen. Petey was asleep on the couch in front of the television with the sound down and his Mariners cap over his face, and Mrs. Lahti upstairs was walking back and forth the way she did when she couldn't sleep. And Jodie was sitting at the kitchen table in her Dairy Queen uniform with her arms folded and her face blotchy, and the minute I came in the door she stood up so fast the chair went over backward.
"Where's his grandmother?" she said.