"South." He almost smiled. "Where I said. I got a brother in Quartzsite, Arizona, I ain't seen in nine years. Lives in a trailer by the river and don't own a telephone. I figured I'd go there. I figured I'd think of something after."
"With sixty-one cents."
"I had forty dollars in Fernley. I put thirty-eight of it in the tank at Fallon and the rest in crackers and a pint of milk. I wasn't thinking real good."
"No," Coralee said. "You weren't."
She sat beside him in the booth for a long moment, looking at her own hands on the table. Then she started to talk, and she had not known she was going to, and she told him about Rory. She told it the way he had told his, in order, without leaving out the parts that made her look bad. Lamar and the trailer in Fallon. The bottle of vodka in the toilet tank and the other one in the dryer vent and the other one in the spare tire well of the Nova. The Harrigan Road at eleven in the morning. Please, Mama, slow down. The four stitches. Lorene at the foot of the bed in her church clothes, saying I'm going to take him home now, Coralee.
"And she was right," Coralee said. "Your girl's judge was wrong, maybe, I don't know, I've never met her. But Lorene was right. If she'd left Rory with me in the spring of 1980 I'd have killed him. I'd have killed him in a car or I'd have killed him by forgetting he was in the bathtub, one or the other, sooner or later. I know that the way I know my own name."
He was looking at her now, very hard.
"So I'm the grandma," he said slowly. "That's what you're telling me. I'm your Lorene."
"You're her and you're not her," Coralee said. "That's what I'm trying to figure out. That's why I lied to Thane. Because you're her, and you've got every reason, and you love that little girl so much you'd drive her to Arizona with sixty-one cents to keep her safe. And Lorene loves Rory like that. She's had him three and a half years. She's not a bad woman. She's a good woman who's scared to death of me. And she's got a right to be."
"Then you see it."
"I see it. I see all of it." She turned on the vinyl to face him. "But I want to tell you something, Mr. Kroll, and I want you to listen to me, because I'm the only one you've ever met who's made it to three years, you said so yourself. So you listen."