Chapter 16: Paducah

Joyce's sister met us at the fourth-floor nurses' station, still in her church dress, with her purse clutched against her stomach.

"She asked for the girl," she said. "She asked three times."

"I'm Carrie," I said.

"I know who you are."

She said it without heat.

I had left Eli with Rhonda and driven two hours west beside Kent without saying much, and I still wasn't sure why I had come.

I think I wanted to see it.

Room 412 held one bed and one window.

The woman in the bed had a plastic bracelet on her wrist and no powder-blue suit.

Her hair was flat on one side from the pillow.

Without the curls, her head looked small and pale.

She turned her face when we came in.

"Kent," she said. "Oh, Kent. You came."

"I came to tell you something, Mom."

"Of course you did."

"Your pressure was high," her sister said from the doorway. "They want her another night. She's not dying, she's just..."

"Hush."

It was the only time I heard Joyce lose her voice.

She looked past her son to me.

"You came too."

"I wanted to see you say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever it is you asked for."

Joyce pressed the call button, then let it go.

She folded her hands on the blanket and began to talk, in a different voice than I had ever heard her use.

She said she was sorry.

She repeated it over and over, because she couldn't stand to meet my eyes.

She said she had been wrong about me, wrong about the letter, and wrong about the card.

"I will sign anything," she said. "The house on Chestnut. The lake lot. I'll go to the church and confess it."