Chapter 6 — WHAT SHE SAID FIRST

I said, "Sarah."

"I mean it."

"Nobody said anything about—"

"I know what you're doing." She was breathing in a way that made every sentence cost her something. "You've got a legal pad. You've made a list. Item five says lawyer."

I did not say anything, because item five said lawyer.

"I sent Eli to you for money," she said. "For the room and for food, until I'm—"

She stopped.

"Until this is over. That's it. That's the whole thing I asked for."

"And then what?"

"And then Renee takes them."

"Who is Renee?"

"My friend. In Poughkeepsie."

"Has she agreed?"

Sarah looked at the ceiling for a while.

"She's thinking about it."

"Sarah."

"She's *thinking about it*, Dad."

That is the first time she called me that and I do not think she noticed.

I said, "Does she know they'd be together? Both of them?"

And my daughter turned her head on the pillow and looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her in eighteen years of raising her, which was that she had been afraid of one thing for a long time and I had just said it out loud.

"They have to stay together," she said.

"I know."

"No. You don't." She got herself up onto one elbow, which took a while. "You don't know how this works. I've been reading about it for six weeks. If nobody takes them, the county takes them, and the county doesn't have a lot of homes that take a ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl in the same place. They split. It happens constantly. Eli goes one place and Mabel goes another and they get visits."

"Then let me—"

"No."

"Why?"

And there it was.

She lay back down and she said it to the ceiling.

"Because I'm not going to hand my children to a man who signs the paper."

I did not understand.

I want to record that I genuinely did not understand, in that room, at that moment. I sat there and turned that sentence over and got nothing out of it.

I said, "What paper?"

Sarah Harrison closed her eyes and did not answer me, and a few minutes later a nurse came in to do something to the line in her chest, and I stood up and said I would come back tomorrow, and she did not say don't.

I got as far as the door.

She said, "Dad."

I turned around.

"Is the diner still open past nine?"

"No."

"He got in, though."

"He got in."

She almost smiled.

"He's stubborn," she said. "Like Mom."