What the Driver Saw

His name was Walt Osei, and he made two cups of instant coffee neither of them needed, the way people do when their hands require a job before their mouths can manage the harder one.

"It wasn't your mother's fault," Walt said. "Say that first, plainly, because I know how these things grow simpler and uglier in the retelling, and I won't have that happening in my own kitchen." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "The dog got loose. Your mother was chasing it, hollering your name, because you'd wandered off toward it same as any five-year-old would. Josephine Hargrove ran into the road going after the dog herself — trying to help catch it, best anyone could tell after — same second I was pulling up to the stop. I braked. I did everything right and it still wasn't enough, because sometimes right isn't the same as enough, whatever the lawyers decide afterward."

"Then why did my mother carry it like she caused it?"

"Because she was the one who let the dog off the leash that morning, in a hurry, because you two were running late, because she'd been up half the night arguing with your father about something neither of them would ever tell me and I never asked." Walt set his mug down with the exactness of a man who has told this story to himself a thousand times in the dark and never once out loud. "No court, no insurance man, nobody official ever laid a hand of blame on Carol Vance. But she laid it on herself, brick by brick, for the rest of her life, and she never let a single other person help her carry it — not the Hargroves, not your father, and Lord knows not you, age five, who couldn't have carried anything at all."

Mara thought of Ruth's forty years, of Edwin's forty-one, of Dorothy's four decades of hoarded bread. Her mother, it turned out, had not been a woman who forgot to apologize. She had been a woman who apologized constantly, silently, endlessly, to everyone except the people standing in front of her.

"Where's Josephine now?" Mara asked.

"Grown," Walt said. "Moved to Rochester, far as the Christmas cards used to say, before they stopped coming, which was around the time your mother stopped being able to stand writing them." He slid a slip of paper across the table, an address already written in a shaking, careful hand, as though he too had been waiting thirty-one years for someone to finally ask him for it. "I kept this a long time not knowing who I was keeping it for. Turns out it was you."