I set my purse down on the counter. I set the envelope down on top of it. "Hello to you, too."
"Don't." Her voice cracked. "Don't do that. Darrell picked me up from work. He was crying, Mom. He was crying in the car. He's been driving around all night looking for her. She's sick, she's got some kind of — she gets confused, and she's out there somewhere in this, and he went into the Sandbar and asked you, and you lied to him. He knows you lied. He said he could tell. The man at the Union 76 across the street saw you put an old lady in your car in the alley. Why would you do that? Why would you hide a sick old woman from her own family? What's wrong with you?"
I'll tell you what I wanted to do. I wanted to say, You don't talk to me that way in my kitchen. I wanted to say, I'm your mother, and I said so, and that's the end of it, and you're not seeing him again. I wanted to snatch the car keys and lock her in her room until she was twenty-five. I could feel all of it rising up in me like the tide coming up under the pilings, and I could hear, as plain as if he were standing in the kitchen, Darrell's voice saying, Your mother's a hard woman, Jodie. She'd turn you out in the rain.
I picked up the chair and set it back on its legs. I sat down in the other one. My knees weren't good.
"She's safe," I said. "She's at her sister's. She asked me to take her there. She's not confused, Jodie. She came into the Sandbar this morning on purpose to see me. She brought me something. I'm going to show it to you. And then you can decide what you think. I'm not going to tell you what to think. But you're going to look at it first."
"I don't want to look at anything —"
"And then," I said, "I'm going to tell you something about your father. That I should have told you a long time ago. And you're going to hate me for not telling you, probably. That's all right."
She stared at me. She'd never heard me say anything about her father except that we'd grown apart and that he was a good fisherman and that his checks were late.