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Ruth lived in a small square house in Lakeside, built after the war for an ore dock foreman, with a picture window and a glassed-in back porch full of African violets. The spare room had a twin bed with a chenille spread, a sewing machine under a dust cover, and a framed photograph of two boys in matching sweaters standing on the rocks at Brighton Beach, squinting into the sun. Nora sat on the bed in her coat and looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then she unzipped the green duffel and took everything out of it and laid it on the chenille spread, one item at a time. Sweaters. Socks. The library books. Her laptop, thank God, in its padded sleeve. Three spiral notebooks with green cardboard covers, all of them full of work notes in her small square handwriting: patient encounter codes, payer rules, reminders to herself about modifier 25.
The fourth notebook, the one labeled 1418 E 10TH, was not there.
She checked the gray roller. She checked the hard-shell case, and the bin, and the pockets of every coat. She checked the duffel again, turning it inside out and running her hands along the seams. Then she sat back down on the bed and put her face in her hands.
When Ruth came in a little later with two cups of tea, Nora said, without lifting her head, "He took it."
Ruth set the tea on the sewing machine. "The paper?"
"The paper. The notebook. Every payment, every confirmation number. Eleven months. He took the whole thing."
Ruth sat down beside her on the bed. The springs creaked. For a long while neither of them said anything.
"His father hid things too," Ruth said at last. "Did Daniel ever tell you how Arne died?"
"On an ore boat. In ninety-four."
"He was a deckhand on the Edwin H. Gott. He fell in the hold in Two Harbors in November and broke his neck. That's the part everyone knows." Ruth looked at the photograph on the wall. "What nobody knows is that three weeks after the funeral, a man from the bank came to my door and told me we were nine months behind on the house. Arne had taken out a second mortgage to cover some gambling debts. Card games, on the boats, in the off season. I never knew. Not one word. He went to work every morning and came home every night and kissed me and lied to me, for nine months, with two little boys asleep upstairs." She smoothed the chenille spread with her palm. "I lost that house. We moved into an apartment over a laundromat on Fourth Street. Daniel was eleven. He was the one who found me crying at the kitchen table the night the bank man came. I always thought—" She stopped. "I always thought that was why he worked so hard. Why he wanted to fix houses. I thought he would be the opposite