A long, cautious pause. “She’s got to attend church.”
“Fine. On the condition that when I set up health and other insurance, you take her in for regular checkups—physical, dental, optical—to medical professionals we agree on beforehand.” She did not say yes or no to that. “If you break the terms of the agreement, I come and take Luz away. If I break them, I give you the documents.” It would be easy enough to take them back again. “All we have to do is make the agreement, and all communication between us will thereafter be through my lawyer, who will hold the documents until Luz is eighteen. Agreed?”
“If you tell me who you are, and why you’re doing this.”
“No.”
“Then we’re done talking.”
“You don’t need my name.”
“I might not be Miss College Mouth Audrey Thomas or whoever the hell you are, but I know a woman who’s hiding something pretty big when I see her. Checks and insurance and doctors. We aren’t talking pin money here. So I want to know who you are and what Luz is to you.”
The key to negotiation lies in ensuring the other party needs to reach an agreement more than you do, my mother told me once when I was twelve. If you’re willing to walk away, you will win. When I asked her what to do if it was something you really, really wanted, she said, If you have a personal stake, get someone else to negotiate on your behalf. That only works if you have someone else.
If you’re willing to walk away… But, Choose, Julia had said, and she had loved me. “I won’t tell you my name.”
“Then—”
“But I will tell you this. I used to be something like that man, like Geordie Karp, but I’ve changed. I’ve—I’ve seen the error of my ways.” I remembered the sampler. “Now I want to do unto others as I would be done by. I want to atone for the past. Helping Luz, helping you all—Luz and you and your husband, and Button—is the only way I know to make it even partway right.”
Long silence. “I met that man but once,” Adeline said meditatively, “and I didn’t like him. Not one bit. He wasn’t the kind to give anyone anything—especially not something like this.” She leaned forward and tapped Luz’s documents. “So I reckon you took them, or maybe made him give you them. So I’m thinking that maybe it’s not a coincidence that he’s in the hospital mostly dead and you’re sitting here talking to me about his daughter. No, close your mouth, I haven’t finished. You had something to do with his hurt. It might be that you hired some roughnecks to settle his hash. It might be that you had good reason. But I don’t much care. He was a bad man. A very bad man. You say you used to be like him. Now, you don’t seem that way to me, except for all your lying, but how can I tell for sure? The way it looks to me, Miss Walk-in-Here-with-a-Big-Checkbook, is that I could be getting myself into just the same mess I got myself into before. There’s a lot I don’t understand and don’t know, and that means maybe one day someone, maybe you, could show up at my door and take Luz, take my child away. And she is mine. She may not have come from my loins in blood and sweat and tears like Button did, but she’s in here.” She thumped her breastbone. “And I need something—some kind of guarantee that’s more than a lawyer’s paper—and I reckon that’s your name.”
I was sipping air carefully, trying to protect my ribs. “What will you give me in return?”
“The time of day.” She folded her arms again.
I stared past her for almost a minute, then reached into my pocket for my wallet. Moving, even my right arm, was getting harder. I pulled out my license and stared at it. The face in the picture seemed naked and defenseless.
“I’ll show you this license on two conditions. One, that you never write my name down anywhere, ever. Two, that you tell no one what it is, not even Jud.” And that you treat her like a daughter. That you love her, because she’s only nine years old.
She considered, nodded, and held out her hand. I gave her the license.
“Aud Torvingen. What kind of name is that?”
“Norwegian.”
She nodded again, mouthed the name to herself a couple of times, and handed it back.
Now she had my name. And a woman in New York had seen my face. One chance phone call could put them together.
“Aud? Miz Torvingen?”
I wrenched my attention back to the table. “Yes.”
“Your color isn’t so good.” Kind Christian Lady returns, magnanimous in victory.
“I’m fine.”
“Yes, well.” She picked up her coffee mug. “Get you a refill?”
I shook my head, paid scant attention as she got up and poured for herself. What was it like to care so fiercely for a scrap of humanity you could carry as easily as a small sack of potatoes? What was it like to be the one so cared for? “Why does Luz call you Aba?”
She cleared her throat and made a production of adding sugar and cream. She cleared her throat again. “She called me that from the beginning. Two years now. It’s from Abuela, Spanish for grandmother. I looked it up,” she added defiantly.
“That’s not all you taught her that you weren’t supposed to, is it?”
“No.”
“I’d like to hear about it, about Luz. Will you tell me?”
She turned and sat. “She was such a sad little thing, always weeping and talking in Spanish. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t talk English, wouldn’t take any comfort. I didn’t know what to do, until one day I took Jud’s truck to the library and borrowed a cassette and a book. Had to buy a cassette player too. Had to hide it from Jud. But, oh, you should have seen her sweet face when I put that tape on!” She wiped absently at her eyes. “A flood of words! What with the book and everything, I learned to say Hello and Eat this, and after an hour or two, she was eating pretty as you please and calling me Aba.”
“And you two talk Spanish to each other.”
“God gave her her own language and I don’t see anything wrong in having it spoken in this house.”
“Mrs.—Adeline, I’m not criticizing. Just the opposite. But there’s more, isn’t there?”
She twisted her wedding ring. “Math. She could add and subtract if she did it in Spanish, so I didn’t see the harm of showing her how in English. And you can’t get much done in the house if you don’t know how to multiply and divide. And then… Well, you’ve talked to her, she’s a curious little thing. Once she had the bit between her teeth she had to know more. So I bought some encyclopedias at a yard sale and I taught her, and after a while I started sneaking to the library for extra books when Jud had them both off swimming or suchlike. He doesn’t know. I thought it best.”
“How much of an obstacle is he likely to be?”
“Mostly I worried, before, about following the agreement we had with Miz Goulay. Jud’s stubborn about such things. A man’s word is his bond.” She gave me a complicit woman-to-woman smile that congealed suddenly: no doubt remembering I was nothing like a good Christian wife and mother.
“Perhaps it would be best for you to speak to him privately.”
“I can speak of it some,” she said slowly. “You’ll have to do the money talk.”
“Yes. But perhaps you could give me an idea of what he might think was fair.” I gathered the documents. “How much did Karp send you a month?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
According to his records, it had been four hundred. “And do you think that’s fair? Take a moment to think it through.”
“Six hundred?” she hazarded.
“Let’s begin with seven-fifty, and review the situation after three months.” By my estimate, they would need at least fifteen hundred a month to give Luz what I thought she needed, but for the Carpenters, especially Jud, that might be an immoral sum, easily confused with a temptation of Mammon.