“What would you do?”
“I’d hit him with a frying pan,” she said. “But I’m not you, and you’re a better person than me.”
I laughed. It came out of me so suddenly that Evelyn startled and pulled off and blinked up at me in the dark.
“Sorry, baby,” I whispered. “Sorry. Grandma’s being funny.”
Ben started writing letters.
The first one came three days after the doorstep. It was in a plain white envelope with my name on the front in his blocky handwriting. My dad brought it in from the mailbox and held it out between two fingers like it might bite him.
“You want me to throw it out?”
I almost said yes.
“No,” I said. “Give it to me.”
I didn’t open it for two days. It sat on the dresser in my old bedroom next to the stack of diapers. Every time I changed Evelyn, I looked at it.
