And I remembered that morning. I remembered it all at once, standing there.
I was thirteen. It had snowed so hard the school buses didn’t run. My mother came home three hours late and sat down at the kitchen table without even taking her coat off. Dad made her eggs. She held the fork and didn’t eat. Then she said, “Tom and Connie Hanley had a girl,” and she got up and went to bed.
That was the whole report. That was all any of us ever got from her. Thirty-four years of nights, and that was what came home. One sentence over cold eggs.
I had eaten my cereal and gone outside to build a snow fort.
“A month,” the sheriff said finally. “Nights. Starting tonight. And if Kim tells me you so much as sighed, you’re finished.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door of the red pickup opened then.
