"No, ma'am. Not just like that. Nine days in my bed seeing things on the ceiling. Nobody to tie me down, neither." He drank, finally, a sip of the coffee. "But I didn't drink no more. And in June they let me have her. And I had her two years and four months."
He told her about the two years. He told her in a different voice, and Coralee, who had come to the Cattail that night certain that she knew everything there was to know about the voice in which people talked about the people they loved, found that she had been wrong. He told her how he had learned to braid, or tried to, from a library book with diagrams, and how it never came out right, and how Dovie didn't care. How he had taught her to read off the backs of cereal boxes and the signs on 93. How the smelter shut down in August, this year, the last fire banked, the stack that had stood over McGill his whole life going cold, so that for the first time in seventy years there was no smoke over the town, and how Dovie had asked him whether the giant was dead.
"I didn't drink," he said. "Two years and eight months, now. But I want you to know something, since you're asking what's true. I never believed it. Not one day. Every morning I woke up I figured that was the day. Krolls don't stay quit. My daddy didn't. His daddy didn't. My girl didn't. I figured I was just holding my breath, and one of these days I'd let it out."
Coralee said nothing. She knew that feeling. She had had it for the first year and most of the second.
"Jolynn went down to Reno," he said. "After they took the baby. Went through a program at Saint Mary's and come out and drank. Went through a different one and come out and drank. Then last spring she went in again, the one on Mill Street, and she called me from there in July and said, Daddy, this time's different. And I said, sure it is, honey." He shook his head. "I said sure it is, honey, like that. Like you'd say it to a child that's telling you she seen a ghost."
"And it was different."
"I don't know." He looked at her with those colorless eyes. "That's what I'm telling you. I don't know. She come out in August. She got a job at a laundry on Fourth Street. She got the apartment with the yellow door. She went to her meetings, she went to her counselor, she peed in a cup for the county every week. And she went to the judge and said she wanted her baby back, and the judge looked at all her papers and looked at me, sixty-seven years old with my lungs half full of copper dust and no smelter and no job and a company house the company's selling out from under me, and in October he give Dovie back to her." He said the words carefully, the way you'd carry a full pot. "And he give me every other weekend. Friday six o'clock to Sunday six o'clock. Three hundred and nineteen miles each way, on 50, across the emptiest country God ever made. So I drove it. Three times now. Pick her up Friday, sit in a motel in Fernley, Saturday we go to the park, the Sunday I bring her back. And every time I take her up them stairs to that yellow door I think, this is the time. This is the time I'm going to knock and she's going to answer it with a glass in her hand."
He stopped. Outside the window a truck went by, southbound, slow, and both of them watched its lights until they were sure it was not Thane's.
"Tonight," Coralee said.
"Tonight." He put his cup down. "Tonight I brung her back at five-thirty. Little early. We'd run out of things to do and it was cold. And I went up them stairs with her, and there was a paper sack sitting on the landing by the door. Liquor store sack, the tall kind. And sticking out the top of it, the neck of a bottle. Green glass, and gold foil on the top. And through the door I could hear her laughing. Jolynn. And some other voice, a big loud laugh. And I stood there." He swallowed. "I stood there on the landing with Dovie's hand in mine, and I looked at that bottle with the gold foil, and I heard my girl laughing that way, that high way she used to laugh at two in the morning in my front room with the two glasses out. And Dovie said, Pa, knock. And I didn't knock. I picked her up and I went back down them stairs and put her in the truck and I drove."
"Where?"