room, and five minutes after that she was downstairs again, at the stove again, watching as the kettle came slowly, so slowly, to boil. He’d done his best to hide it but her eye had gone directly to the light-blue envelope, one of hers, among the other letters and valentines in the shoebox in his closet. This envelope never opened. This envelope addressed to Sheriff Wayne Halsey.
The kettle began to whistle and she played the seal of the envelope over the steam, helping it along with a butter knife until the flap popped free, then she took the envelope to the table and sat down with it before her.
Inside were several sheets of her stationery, and when she opened these up the square of cloth slipped out and fell without a sound to the table and her heart stopped beating. Just stopped. A square of white silk so sheer she could see the grain of the tabletop beneath it. Her fingertips trembled on her lips and she didn’t have to touch the cloth to know; she’d touched it before, in the store, when the blouse lay draped over her arm, and again when she’d folded it into its box . . . you’d have to wear something under it, a camisole, and did the girl have anything like that?—you couldn’t ask her father and you couldn’t ask the girl herself . . . Well, let her figure that part out for herself, the blouse was not cheap even with her store discount, and she might not even like it, or she might not like it out of spite, but a birthday was a birthday and the girl could always take it back for something she wanted and you just couldn’t worry about that, but wasn’t it lovely, wasn’t it nice to buy something fine for a young woman when all your life you’d bought clothes for boys . . .
And Holly had worn the blouse that night, the night of the river, and one way or another, by accident or by some other encounter gone wrong—by some kind of violence—the pocket had been torn from the blouse and had not gone into the river with her but had been kept, had been hidden, and had been brought out of hiding all these years later to fall without a sound to her kitchen table.
She wiped her eyes, then wiped her hands on her lap and when her fingertips were dry she picked up the three pages of stationery and read the letter her son had written to the sheriff.
50
After lunch Jeff got a Chevy Impala up in the air and began tearing out the exhaust front to back while Marky stood by to hand him the tools he asked for, and Danny didn’t call and you gotta stay busy is all, you just gotta keep working and not even thinking about it, not watching the clock and not even thinking about it and then he’ll call, he’ll call to say he’s far away now and everything is OK . . . and at 2:15 Tony the parts man came with the new exhaust parts and Marky was entering those into the computer when his phone vibrated in his pocket, and he fumbled for it and got it out and read the screen and it was his mother, and his heart dropped back into place.
“Marky, can you talk a minute?”
“I’m at work Momma.”
“I know, but Marky I need to ask you—did Danny say anything else last night, when he woke you up?”
Marky stood with the phone to his ear, his heart kicking.
“Marky—?”
“He didn’t say anything else Momma he just said to say good-bye.”
“Marky . . . are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes Momma.”
He held the phone to his ear, listening. Finally she said, “I’ve been trying to call him and he won’t pick up,” and Marky put his other hand flat on the counter, because everything had just gone a little bit crooked, like after you’ve been spun around and around.
“You always say turn off your phone when you’re driving Momma,” he said.
“I know it. Has he called you?”
“No Momma.”
Jeff began banging on something under the Impala, banging away until whatever it was fell clattering to the concrete, and she didn’t speak again until the noise had ended.
“If he calls you,” she said, “will you tell him to call me, please?”