I held it in my hands for a long time.
I drove it into Odell at a quarter to eleven that night.
I was forty-one years old, and I had never once seen the room where my mother worked.
It was smaller than my office. Smaller than my office in Burnsville that I complain about. Two chairs. A wall of screens. A coffee maker with a brown stain on the burner. And a paper map of the whole county under a sheet of glass, with thirty-four years of her pencil marks rubbed into it so deep they’d become part of the paper.
I put my fingers on that glass. Right on County Road 6.
Kim was in the first chair. She was younger than I expected, with her hair pulled back tight. Kyle Brandt was already sitting in the second chair, in a plain gray T-shirt, with his hands flat on his knees like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office.
