Edna looked at her hands. "That you're a hard woman. That you don't understand her. That you're jealous because your own marriage failed. That you'd throw her out on the street if you ever found out she was serious about him. That she can't trust you." She lifted her eyes. "He's said it in front of me a dozen times since July. Your mother's a hard woman, Jodie. Your mother would turn you out in the rain."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"I found that list last Thursday," Edna said. "In his jeans. Friday the fifteenth. J. Seven a.m. Money, Gramma's. Don't tell A. There's three dollars and twelve cents left in that bank, so I don't know what he means about money, unless he means the milk check, which comes on the fifteenth, which is why I suppose he picked the fifteenth. And Mike in Reno is a man he knew in Longview who parks cars for a casino, and I've heard him on the phone with him. He's taking her to Reno on Friday morning, Arlene. And I don't know what she thinks it is. I think she thinks it's a fresh start somewhere with sun. But I know what it is, because I've already seen it once. It's six hundred miles from her mother."
"I could have mailed it," Edna said. "I thought about that. I wrote your name on the envelope three times. But I thought, she'll open it standing at her mailbox in the rain, alone, and she'll think it's a crank. She'll think it's some crazy old woman, because by then that's what everybody will have told her I am. I thought she has to see my face. And I thought of the sheriff, too, I want you to know that. Deputy Ekstrom is her husband, the one at the bank. I sat in the truck outside the sheriff's office in Astoria for an hour on Friday and couldn't make myself go in. Because what was I going to tell him? That three years ago I lied, and now I'd like to un-lie, but only about the parts that suit me? And that I've got no proof my grandson took my money except my own word, and my word is worth whatever Darrell's already made it worth?" She shook her head. "So I came to the person who could still do something. Who it was still in time for."
"How did you get here?"
"The milk truck," she said. "I rode in with the Darigold driver this morning at five. He's a nice young man. He let me off at the Safeway on Commercial. I've been walking up and down in the rain since six, trying to make my feet come in this door." She looked at the window. "And then when I came in, I saw it was still the same. The tape on the seat. The hooks in the ceiling. The bridge. And I thought, I can't do it on an empty stomach. I can't. I haven't been able to eat in