And a woman she had never heard of rang her on a Tuesday evening and told her that her father had been alive nine weeks ago, on a porch, in the rain, about two hundred miles away.
I have never heard anybody make the noise that woman made on that telephone and I do not expect to again.
The Saturday he was saving for was her birthday. He had worked out the fare and the date and he was going to turn up at a door he had not been to in four years.
That is what was in that envelope under my mat.
Roseanne has been here twice now. She drove four hours both times and stayed in a motel on the edge of town.
She has done in eleven weeks what I did not do in nine days. She has four posters up. She has been in the shop. She has walked that whole neighbourhood with a photograph from 2017.
And she will not take the two hundred and twelve dollars.
It is still in my drawer. I have offered it to that woman four times now, twice in person, and she has refused it four times.
She says it is not hers and it is not mine.
She says it is his, and that it is a bus fare, and that it is going to get used as one — and that when it does, it is going the other direction.
She has got that worked out already. She has got the route.
Junie knows all of it, more or less, at eight. I decided that in the second week and I am not sure it was right and I have not changed my mind.
She asks about him. Not often — about once a fortnight, usually in a car, which is where that child asks me everything difficult.
Last week she asked whether he knew our names.
And I said he knew mine. And she thought about that for about four seconds and then asked whether I thought he had been cold, and I said no, and that is the one lie I have told her about any of this.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a woman with nothing who gave an old man a blanket and a hot plate in a storm, and found two hundred and twelve dollars under her doormat in the morning.
