plum, which he kept cleaner than I'd ever kept anything in my life, including my children. He had good manners. That's what I remember thinking the first time she brought him to the house, that he had very good manners, that he called me Mrs. Hakala even though I'd told him twice I'd gone back to using it only because it was on the kids' school forms, that he stood up when I came into the room and took his cap off at the table and asked Petey about his baseball cards like he actually wanted to know. He brought me chrysanthemums from the Safeway once, the price sticker peeled off. He lived with his grandmother out in Brownsmead, on the dairy flats east of town, and he talked about her a great deal, how she'd raised him after his mother left, how she was getting on, how he worried about her. I liked that. A young man who worries about his grandmother.
And he drove Jodie places. That's the part I'm not proud of. In 1982 I worked six days a week, and the Pinto was a dice roll every morning, and when a young man with a clean car and a job history and good manners offered to drive my daughter to school and her job at the Dairy Queen and home again at night, some tired part of me said thank God and didn't ask anything else.
But by October there were things. Small things, the kind of things you set to one side because if you picked them up you'd have to look at them. Jodie had quit the yearbook staff, which she'd loved, because Darrell said the adviser looked at her funny. She'd stopped calling her friend Shelley, who she'd known since kindergarten, because Darrell said Shelley was jealous. She wore a sweater one warm Saturday in September and said she was cold. And she'd started talking about after graduation in a way that didn't include the community college in Astoria, or the dental assistant program in Portland we'd sent away for the brochure for, or anything at all except Darrell and a place in Reno where a cousin of his could get him on at a casino, parking cars, and how the sun shone there three hundred days a year. "Three hundred days, Mom," she said, standing at the kitchen window watching our rain. "Can you imagine?"
I could imagine. That was the trouble. I'd been seventeen once, and I'd married Keith Hakala at nineteen, the summer after the storm, because he had a car and a laugh and he made the rain seem like somebody else's problem. I knew exactly what she was imagining.
That's what I was thinking about at a quarter to eleven, wiping down the pie case, when the bell over the door jangled and the old woman came in out of the weather.