Part 5
The boy began picking at a loose thread on Nora’s sleeve. Grant watched the small movement because looking at her was suddenly more than he could manage.
“I didn’t give him your name to make you responsible,” she said. “You weren’t there to hear it. I just couldn’t bear to lose that, too.”
Grant leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Start wherever you can,” he said. “I’m listening.”
She took a while to begin. She spoke first about the exam she’d taken to get into nursing school.
“I passed,” she told him. “I remember wanting to call you before I even got outside.”
She had slept only a few hours over several days. Between studying, the diner, and helping Helen through a flare of arthritis, she was scarcely keeping herself upright. Dean was waiting outside the admissions building with a bunch of flowers.
He said Grant had asked him to deliver them.
Nora gave a little shake of her head. “You would’ve hated asking him. I knew that. But I wanted to believe you’d found a way to send me something.”
Dean told her there was a package at his apartment as well. Grant had supposedly sent it there because arranging it from training was difficult and he wanted it kept private. Rain was starting. Nora’s feet hurt. She had known Dean since she was thirteen.
She accepted the ride.
“At his place, he made tea. I sat down with my coat still on.” She pressed her lips together. “That’s the last part I remember clearly. Waiting for him to get the package.”
By the time she woke, the light in the room had changed. Her clothes were still on. She was disoriented, sick, frightened by the hours she couldn’t account for.
Dean had photographs to show her.
“He said he hadn’t done anything else. And my clothes… I had no reason to think he had. But he’d taken his shirt off. He’d put his arm around me. One picture looked like we were on a bed, though I’d never left the couch.”
Grant turned his face away for a moment. He could hear a delivery truck reversing across the street, its warning beeps impossibly ordinary.
“He wanted me to stop talking to you,” Nora continued. “If I didn’t, he said everybody would get them. You, Mom, people from school, the nursing instructors.”
“Did you tell anybody what he’d done?”
“I threatened to go to the police.”
She looked down at her son before continuing.
“He told me his uncle was high up at the sheriff’s office. He talked about your mother’s friends in government. He said I could complain all I wanted, but the pictures would still exist.”
“Dean frightened you into silence.”
“I was nineteen. I couldn’t stop being ashamed, even though I knew I hadn’t agreed to anything. Mom was already sick. I kept imagining her opening a message and finding those pictures.”
The child twisted the thread between his fingers. Nora gently loosened his grip.
“I stopped using the phone. Shut the accounts down. Every time I thought about calling you from somewhere else, I heard him telling me what he’d send.”
Grant looked back at her. “And my mother?”
“Dean said she’d brought him to her office. That she wanted me gone before you had a chance to come home.”
He felt his teeth press together.
“I thought maybe he was lying about that part,” Nora said. “Trying to make sure I had nowhere to turn. Later, when she came to us, I stopped wondering.”
“When did you find out about the baby?”
“A few weeks afterward.”
Grant glanced at the boy. “You knew.”
“There wasn’t anyone else.”
He bowed his head.
“I meant to tell you in person,” she said. “I thought if you could see me, if I could get you alone without anyone helping us misunderstand each other…” Her voice failed briefly. She drew a breath and went on. “I thought you’d come home on leave. I kept waiting for that.”
Grant remembered the forms he hadn’t submitted, the excuses he had given Arthur, the satisfaction he had taken in being too busy to think.
Nora shifted G.T. on her lap. He was getting heavy, but she didn’t put him down.
The fire came when she was seven months pregnant.
Helen woke before dawn to the smell of smoke. Faulty wiring inside a wall had ignited, and by the time Nora got her mother downstairs, smoke was filling the rooms behind them. Nora had grabbed her coat from a hook. Everything else stayed inside: the sewing equipment, their savings, family photographs, the things Helen had started making for the baby.
They stood outside in their nightclothes while firefighters worked.
Vivian arrived that afternoon carrying coffee.
“She spoke to everybody like she was there to take care of us,” Nora said. “Mom thanked her. That’s what I remember most clearly. Mom kept thanking her.”
Vivian knew of a vacant house, formerly owned by an aunt who had died. It was outside Merriton, in Westray County, far enough from Darrow that getting back would take money Nora didn’t have. The house had a propane tank, unreliable heat, and water that left stains beneath the taps.
Nora had looked at her mother sitting under a borrowed blanket and accepted.
“She didn’t have to tell me to stay away from you after that,” Nora said. “She knew where she’d put us.”
G.T. was born at a small regional hospital during a February snowstorm. Helen held him with both hands beneath his head and wept so hard a nurse brought her tissues.
Three months later, Helen had a stroke.
Nora’s account became quieter. One side of her mother’s body had weakened. Speech took effort. There were appointments, medications, days when Helen couldn’t be left alone. Nora cleaned motel rooms for a while, then tried a grocery job. The price of someone watching the baby swallowed what she earned. She took in mending whenever she could find it.
Lately, she had been choosing which bill could wait and which need could not. The station gave her a place to ask for help without facing anyone who remembered her from before.
“I could tell a stranger I needed money,” she said. “I couldn’t tell someone who’d watched me graduate.”
Grant covered his mouth with one hand.
Nora had told the story without asking him for anything. He looked at the child’s narrow wrists, at the careful way Nora held him, and struggled to make himself sit still.
G.T. slid from her lap.
For a moment he stood between their shoes, considering Grant’s uniform. Then he pointed at the metal identification tag visible where Grant’s collar had opened.
“What’s that thing?”
Grant lowered his hand. “A dog tag. It tells people who I am.”
“You’re in the Army?”
“That’s right.”
The boy looked back at Nora. She was watching him, her hands empty in her lap.
He turned to Grant again.
“Then are you Daddy?”
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