Chapter 22: Thursday Again

"Tell him not today," I said.

The guard looked at Marshall.

Marshall looked at me.

"Not today," I said again. "He can leave a note with my lawyer, and my lawyer will decide what to do with it."

The guard went out.

I heard low voices in the corridor, and then footsteps going away.

When Marshall came back, he was holding one envelope with nothing written on it.

"He asked me to give you this," he said. "I said I'd put it in a drawer."

"Which drawer?"

"The one under the winter tires."

I laughed so hard the baby woke up and complained.

She was five days old when I took her to Willow Run.

She still had no name I could say out loud, because every name I tried sounded like something the judge would have chosen.

"We're calling her the baby until she signs something," Marshall said.

"She hasn't read the terms."

"Nobody has. That's how they get you."

It was a Thursday, and the day room at Willow Run smelled of floor wax and tomato soup.

My mother sat by the window in her quilted robe with a magazine open on her lap that she was not reading.

She looked up when we came in.

For a second, her face was blank, and I steadied myself against it.

Then it cleared.

"Cora," she said. "Cora, bird, you're early."

"Hi, Mom."

"You've got something in your arms."

"I do." I knelt by her chair and laid the baby in the crook of her elbow. "This is your granddaughter."

She looked down for a long time.

Her hand came up and touched the baby's hair, and the baby caught one of her fingers in her fist.