Chapter 19: Records

Nobody in the room moved.

Daniel turned toward the stairs.

For one second his face wasn't smooth at all.

"Baby," he said. "Daddy didn't lie to you."

"You said a little boy in Sacramento."

"That's right."

"Then why did Mama read a letter?"

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Lily held on to the banister with one hand and both whales with the other.

"Grandma said a lie is like a hole in your shoe," she said. "You can walk on it, but it gets wet."

Stool Nine laughed out loud, once, and covered his mouth.

Daniel went red under his collar.

He looked at the room.

Thirty people looked back.

Raymond came out from behind the register.

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to.

"Go home, son."

Daniel looked at his father for the first time that day.

Then he walked out without the envelope.

I went up the stairs and sat down on the step below Lily.

She found my face with her hand.

"Did I do it right?"

"You did it right."

"I still want to see the ocean."

"I know, baby."

"Just not from him."

On Wednesday Raymond drove us across Oakland to the children's hospital in his own car.

He'd bought it Monday, used, a beige sedan with a dent in the door.

"First car I've bought myself in twenty years," he said. "The salesman cried."

"Because you overpaid?"

"Because I paid cash and didn't haggle. He thought I was dying."

The eye clinic was on the third floor, with fish painted on the walls.

Lily ran her fingers along every one of them.

The surgeon was a broad, slow-talking woman in her fifties with reading glasses on her head and a stuffed owl in her coat pocket.

She let Lily hold the owl through the whole exam.

She looked into Lily's eyes with a light for a long time.

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