Jolynn Kroll was twenty-five and looked older and younger at once, the way they all did in the first year. She was thin, in a quilted jacket from the laundry with a name stitched over the pocket, with her father's long bones and somebody else's dark hair, and her face had been scrubbed raw by a night of crying and was white as paper. She came through the door so fast the bell nearly came off its bracket. She did not look at her father. She did not look at the deputy. She looked at Coralee, at the counter, and Coralee pointed, and Jolynn went down the length of the cafe and dropped onto her knees on the linoleum beside the back booth and put her face into the brown corduroy coat where the child was, and stayed there.
Dovie woke. "Mama," she said, muzzy, surprised, as if the most ordinary thing in the world had happened. "Mama, there was pie with mountains."
Behind Jolynn came a broad woman of forty or so in a sheepskin coat, with a big square face and gray in her hair, who stopped just inside the door and took in the room in one look, the deputy, the old man, the waitress, and said, to nobody in particular, "Well. Hell of a night." Her voice was deep enough to rattle a cup. Coralee heard Ozias, on his stool, make a small sound.
It was a while before Jolynn stood up. When she did she had Dovie on her hip, the girl's arms around her neck, and she turned and looked down the counter at her father, and he got off his stool and stood, too, with his cap in his hands, and the whole cafe went quiet without anybody deciding it should.
"I seen a bottle," he said. His voice was hardly there. "On the landing. In a sack. Green, with gold on the top. I heard you laughing. I thought—"
"It was cider," Jolynn said. "Martinelli's. Sparkling cider, Daddy. It's got a gold foil on it so it looks like champagne. For Dovie. A hundred and five days, and it was her first whole month back home, and Marcelline brought paper hats, and we made a cake. We were having a party. When you brought her back. You were supposed to come in." Her chin shook. "I'd bought you a hat."
He made no sound at all. He just stood there, and something in his face went, the way a bank goes in a flood, all at once and without noise.
"You taught me to run," Jolynn said. She said it quietly; it was worse quiet. "You know that? Everything bad happens, you go. Into a bottle or down the stairs, it's the same. I learned it from you before I could tie my shoes. I'm trying to learn something else now, Daddy. I'm trying so hard. And you can't—" She stopped. Her free hand went to the front of her jacket and pressed flat there, over the breast pocket. Coralee saw it, and saw Ozias see it.
"I know it," he said. "I know. I ain't asking you nothing."
Thane cleared his throat, gently. "Ma'am, I'm sorry to have to put it to you now. Washoe's going to want to know if you mean to press this."