Page 20

"Of course she did," I say.

"She said you'd been seen leaving the green last night with a woman. I told her she was mistaken." My mother lifts one eyebrow at me, mild as cream. "Then she called back to say you'd been seen driving behind your own cruiser this morning with the same woman. I told her I'd see for myself."

"Mom."

"I'm making conversation."

"Daddy," Faith says, tugging my sleeve, "can I show Carolina my chalk?"

"Honey," my mother says, "why don't you show me the chalk, and I'll tell you what I think of the spelling." She takes Faith's hand. As she passes me she says, low enough that Faith can't hear, "I'll be on the lawn. For a while."

Her eyes say a good deal more than that, and I take the point.

Carolina watches them go down the walk. She watches my daughter drag my mother toward a sprawl of purple and orange chalk lines. She says, without turning, "Kitchen."

"Carolina."

"I'd like to see your kitchen, please. Now."

I take her duffel out of the cruiser and carry it inside, because it's something to do with my hands. The front hall is narrow and warm and smells like coffee and cold leaves. Pegs on the wall for coats. A bench with a row of small shoes beneath it, one of them with a missing lace. On the doorframe, in pencil, run the marks of every birthday since the first, each with a date and a number in my handwriting.

She stops at the marks. She doesn't touch them. She looks at the little line near the bottom, and the one near her hip. Then at the photographs hanging in a crowded stair-step along the wall: Faith at one, Faith at three in a bathtub full of foam, Faith at six with her front teeth gone. My mother, my father holding a hardware-store sign.

Nobody else.

She notices that. I watch her notice it. She says nothing, and I'm more grateful than I know how to say.

The kitchen is at the back of the house, a long room with a table the previous owners left behind and a refrigerator buried in drawings. A dinosaur magnet holds a spelling test with a sticker in the corner. I put her duffel on a chair. Then I take off the badge, because I can't stand wearing it in front of her any longer, and put it on top of the refrigerator where Faith can't reach.

Carolina has walked to the window over the sink. Her back is to me. Out in the yard my mother and Faith are small figures on the walk, bent over chalk.

"Say it," she says. "Say the part you were going to say in the car."

"I have a daughter."

"I've noticed."

"Her name is Faith. She's seven."

"Seven and a quarter."

"Seven and a quarter." I rub the back of my neck. "Friday nights, she sleeps at my mother's. It's been that way since she was two. It's the only night of the week I don't have her."

"So last night."

"Yeah."

"And the seven o'clock."

"I'm on shift Saturdays. My mother keeps her until I'm off." I make myself keep going. "I don't bring anyone to this house, Carolina. I don't introduce anyone. It's visitors only, people who are leaving, and I tell them so, and I leave early so nobody ever has to see her face, and she never has to see theirs. That's how it's worked for five years."

She turns around.

I've seen her laugh. I've seen her go soft with her hair across a pillow. I've seen her stand barefoot beside broken glass and say I'm being thorough. I haven't seen this. She's very polite, and very still, and her hands are folded in front of her like she's about to give me bad news about my knee.

"So I was a rule," she says.

"No."