Part 2
“Beth knew,” Lena said. “I told her the next morning. She said if I called you, I’d make it worse.”
June loosened her scarf. The loading door was warm where afternoon sun struck the metal, and a little fly kept landing on Lena’s sleeve. June watched it while the sentence settled into its proper meaning.
“You told her you put Walter back in?”
“He wanted to wait in his seat. The office was full, and he said he couldn’t hear himself think. We’d let people wait there before. I was going to get his bag and bring him back inside.”
“How did you get in?”
Lena looked at the wall beside the door. The hook for the van’s spare key was gone, but June could still see the pale rectangle where its label had been. She had written that label herself.
“Beth called me to help move the wheelchair boxes,” Lena said. “I told her Walter was out there. She said later she thought I meant Diana had come. I didn’t check. I went home.”
There had been four wheelchair cartons in the office that morning. June remembered turning sideways between them with her clipboard. Beth had found Walter late that afternoon, when she went out to lock the yard.
“Did you write any of this down?”
“The next morning. On the back of a route sheet. Beth kept it.”
“Then what did you sign?”
“The typed one. It said the last time I saw him, he was in the van.” Lena rubbed at the cuff of her jacket. “That part was true.”
June pulled Otis away from the coffee can. He had found rainwater in the bottom and wanted to drink it, and she needed one small thing she could prevent. The loop of the leash had left a mark across her palm.
“It didn’t say after my check.”
“I know.”
“You watched them do that to me.”
“I thought they’d fix it. Then you called, and you said—” Lena stopped. “I could have come anyway. I know that.”
A van backed into the yard, and Lena moved automatically toward it. June wanted to tell her she hadn’t earned that green jacket. Instead, she asked her to write down what she had just said and give June a copy, in her own words.
Lena nodded. She put the coffee can on a shelf out of Otis’s reach, then opened the loading door. June waited until it closed before trying to make her legs move.
At home, she called Beth and left a message asking for a meeting. Ruth listened from the sink, drying the same bowl through the entire call. June said Lena’s name, the spare key, the account she had signed; then she ran out of breath and gave her phone number, although Beth had known it for years.
“They can put it right,” Ruth said.
“They can put her name where they put mine.”
Ruth laid down the bowl. “Is that what happened?”
June took off Otis’s harness. One strap had twisted beneath his leg, and she worked it flat with her thumb. He stood patiently through the adjustment, lifting his paw when she touched his ankle.
“He was out. He was inside the office. I saw him.”
“I heard you.”
June carried his bowl into the kitchen and measured his supper. In the early months she had sometimes fed him twice because she couldn’t remember doing it; now she moved a clothespin from one side of the food bag to the other. Ruth noticed the clothespin but said nothing about it.
“Lena offered to keep him,” June said.
“I know. I asked her. I thought you’d want somebody he knew.”
“You might have asked me first.”
“You’d stopped answering when I asked.”
Ruth put the clean dishes back in the cupboard. June hadn’t told her to unpack them. After supper she took the instruction sheet off the refrigerator, folded it, and put it beside her phone while she looked up Diana’s number in the little directory she’d kept from work.
Diana agreed to ten minutes the following morning. June left Otis with Ruth and arrived empty-handed, having rejected flowers, a casserole, and the newspaper she had saved with her name in it. Diana seated her at the kitchen table, beside a stack of folded washcloths.
Walter was in an armchair by the open doorway, sorting screws into an old muffin tin. He looked up and asked whether she still took the curve by the water tower too fast. June said she’d slowed down, then felt the uselessness of answering in the present tense.
She told Diana what Lena had said. Halfway through, Walter asked her to speak up. June turned her chair so he could see her face and started again from the part he hadn’t heard.
“I didn’t leave you in there,” she said. “You were in the office when I left.”
Walter rolled a screw between his fingers. “I remember the boxes. Couldn’t get past the boxes.”
Diana shifted the washcloths away from a ring of coffee. She didn’t ask why June had waited or whether she could prove it. She asked how Lena had opened the van.
“With the spare key.”
“Who gave it to her?”
“It hung by the loading door. We used it for forgotten bags. Sometimes, when the office was crowded, we let people wait in the van for their families.”
Diana looked at her father. He was trying to pull two screws apart where their threads had caught, and after a moment he set them down. She waited for him to finish before she turned back.
“He couldn’t get down those steps alone in May. He told the insurance people that, too.”
“We helped him every time.”
“Somebody didn’t.” Diana pushed the washcloths into a straight stack. “I want to know what happened. But I’m not going to call the paper and tell them you were wonderful. I still have to get him into the shower tomorrow.”
June’s own copy of the newspaper was on her kitchen counter. She had pictured Diana beside her when the account was corrected, pictured what it would mean if the person entitled to hate her said that she hadn’t done it. Diana had offered her a chair and listened; June had come wanting more.
“I can send you what Lena writes,” she said.
“Send it. And tell me who showed her that key.”
Walter reached for a washcloth without asking. Diana let him take it, then moved the stack closer so he wouldn’t have to stretch again. June watched him spread it on his knees to catch the screws.
“Was it you?” Diana asked.
“Yes,” June said. “I showed her where we kept it.”
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