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.
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.