Chapter 11: Open the Gate

Nolan never got to finish the sentence.

At dawn Amos pounded on the scale house door with the flat of his hand.

"Robin, you'd better come," he called. "There's a crowd at the road."

I dressed in the dark with my back to the cot.

Nolan didn't speak. He pulled on his coat and handed me mine.

Chelsea was already at the inner gate, wrapped in a blanket.

She looked at me coming out of the scale house with my hair down, and her eyebrows went up.

"So much for the scale house rule," she said.

"Not now, Chelsea."

"Okay. But I'm telling you, I will bring it up later."

On the other side of the outer gate, eight people stood in the road in the grey light.

Six of them were strangers. They had yellow wristbands from the rail yard, and their faces were hollow.

Behind them, a little apart, stood my mother and Troy.

Mom's good coat was filthy. She had lost a shoe.

Troy had a split lip and a bruise that covered half his jaw. Somebody had hit him, and I hoped it had been somebody he owed.

"Robin!" Mom came to the bars and wrapped both hands around them. "Oh, thank God. Open the gate, sweetheart. Please. I'm your mother."

I walked down the lane and stopped on my side of the steel.

The six strangers watched me and said nothing.

"Mom," I said. "You came to my house to pray on Tuesday."

"I know. I know I did. I was wrong."

"You told me you had somewhere to be on Thursday."

She closed her eyes.

"There were people on that platform," I said. "I want you to tell them where you were going."