"And Nora." Ruth had already turned toward her own car, an old maroon Buick she drove with the seat pulled all the way forward. She said it over her shoulder, not looking back. "You let me know if it gets to be too much. I don't have that kind of money. But I have some. And I have a spare room."
It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her in six months, and it came from the woman who had told her in February that she looked like death. Nora sat in her car after Ruth drove away and laughed until the baby woke up and looked at her with deep disapproval.
* * *
After that, she paid it every month.
The payment was one thousand seven hundred and forty dollars, principal and interest and escrow, and it came out of the House on the first of each month by an online transfer she set up herself, as a third-party payment, from her account into the servicer's. Every month she wrote the date and the amount and the confirmation number in the green notebook, on a page she had labeled at the top in block capitals: 1418 E 10TH. Every month she photographed the confirmation screen. She was not a suspicious person. She was simply a person who had spent nine years reading what happened to people when no one wrote anything down.
May. June. July.
Daniel found work. Not the kind of work he had done before, not the beautiful restorations he had built his name on, but work: siding jobs, roof patches, a warehouse buildout in Hermantown for a chain of discount furniture stores, subcontracting for a bigger outfit out of Superior that paid on time and treated him like a hired hand. He came home exhausted and short-tempered and sometimes, she noticed, smelling of beer, and he did not talk about money, and she did not ask. She told herself he was saving. She told herself the Lakeside lawsuit would settle. She told herself a great many things.
Linnea learned to roll over in May, to sit up in June, to crawl in July, backwards at first, with an expression of profound betrayal. She learned to say ba for bottle and ba for ball and ba for bird and ba, with great emphasis, for the ore boats that slid through the canal under the lift bridge, enormous and slow, sounding their horns in long and short blasts that Nora learned to answer by heart. And then one evening in August, sitting on the kitchen floor in a pile of plastic measuring cups, Linnea looked up at Nora and said, with perfect clarity, "Noni."
Nora put down the dish towel she was holding.
"Noni," the baby said again, pleased with herself, and banged a measuring cup on the floor.