He looked straight at Kyle.
“Amy’s twenty-eight now. She teaches second grade in Odell. I have never once been able to pay that back. Not once. And you had the woman standing in the sun because you didn’t like the look of a piece of paper.”
Kyle Brandt was crying openly now. He didn’t try to hide it. He just stood there and let it run down his sunburned face.
And I remembered that morning. I remembered it all at once, standing there.
I was thirteen. It had snowed so hard the school buses didn’t run. My mother came home three hours late and sat down at the kitchen table without even taking her coat off. Dad made her eggs. She held the fork and didn’t eat. Then she said, “Tom and Connie Hanley had a girl,” and she got up and went to bed.
