"You should have told me," she said finally.
"Yes."
"You should have told me before I ever met him."
"Yes."
She took her hand off the wall. She looked at it, like there might be something on it. Then she went into her room and closed the door, not hard, and I heard the bedsprings, and after that I didn't hear anything. I sat on the floor of the hall outside her door with my back against the wall, right under the dent, until past one in the morning. Once, around eleven, the phone rang in the kitchen. It rang fourteen times. Neither of us got up.
I'd like to tell you she came out the next morning and said Mom, you were right, and threw her arms around me. She didn't. She went to school on Wednesday on the bus, which she hadn't ridden since July, with her face closed up like a fist, and she didn't speak to me at breakfast, and she took the envelope with her in her book bag. I let her. It was hers now as much as mine.
On Wednesday, in the dead hour after lunch, I called Longview from the pay phone at the Sandbar. I got the number from Information, and the operator said deposit one dollar and eighty-five cents for the first three minutes, please, and I fed it quarters from my tips while Irja stood beside me pretending to fill the napkin dispensers. A woman answered on the fourth ring. I said my name, and that I was calling from Astoria, Oregon, and that I had a letter she'd written to a Mrs. Tolan in 1980, and there was a silence on the line so long the operator came on and asked for another fifty cents.
"Is he hurting somebody else?" Marva Shaw said.