He nodded.
"Lorene took my boy. She took him legal, out of a hospital, with a judge's paper, and she let me see him every other Saturday in a parking lot, and she never once let me forget why. And I hated her for it. Mr. Kroll, I hated her so much in that first year that some nights the only reason I didn't drink was so I could prove her wrong." Coralee heard her own voice shake and let it. "But she never once took him where I couldn't find him. Not once. I always knew where he was. I could drive by that house on Sheckler Road at two in the morning, and I did, more than you'd believe, and I could look at the window of his room and know he was in there asleep. And that was the thing. That was the thing that held me up. If she'd done what you're doing, if I'd come up the stairs at a hundred and five days and that boy was gone and nobody'd tell me where—" She stopped. "I'd have drunk. That night. I wouldn't have even tried not to. And I'd have kept drinking till it killed me. And I'd have told myself the whole way down that it was her fault."
The old man had gone very still.
"I'm not saying that's right," Coralee said. "I'm saying that's true. You asked what's true."
"And if I'm right about that bottle?" His voice had gone rough. "If I'd knocked on that door, and she'd been drunk, and I'd handed my grandbaby in to her? What then? You tell me what then."
"Then it'd be on her. And the court, and the county, and the people that are supposed to be watching. And you'd go back to the judge and say so, and you'd have every right in the world." She held his eyes. "But you didn't knock. You don't know. You saw a sack on a landing and you heard a laugh through a door, and you ran. And I know about running, Mr. Kroll. Running's how it starts. You just told me so yourself. Two glasses on the table, and nobody says anything. Running is the drink."
He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked across the table at the little girl asleep under the brown corduroy coat with her two fingers in her mouth, and his face did the complicated thing again, the whole argument, and this time Coralee did not know which side was winning.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"I'm going to call her."
"Jolynn ain't got a phone."