hall light you could see it plain: a shallow, rough-edged dent about the size of a dinner plate, with a crack running off it toward the ceiling like a river on a map. Jodie had walked past it ten thousand times. She'd hung her coat on the hook right beside it since she was ten.
I told her. I won't put all of it down here, either. I told her about the Elks and the Christmas bonus and the one word I said. I told her the part before, too, the part I'd never even told Irja, about how sweet Keith had been for the first two years, how he'd fixed my mother's porch steps and brought me flowers from the Safeway, how the first time he grabbed my arm hard enough to leave marks he cried afterward and said it was because he loved me so much it scared him. I told her I'd started wearing sweaters in September. I told her I'd lied to her about it for seven years because I didn't want to take her father away from her, and because I was ashamed, and because it was easier, and that all three of those reasons were true and none of them were good enough.
She stood in the hall with her hand flat on the dent in the wall, fitting her palm into it. She didn't cry. That frightened me more than if she had.
"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