He doesn't move.
"On the floor between the stove and the table. My father died in the front room. They were there for a week before the mailman looked in the window." My voice is coming out, and Idon't know where from. "It was a year and two months before I got out. I missed them by fourteen months, Finn."
He doesn't make a sound.
"They came for your address."
I'm looking at the can. I can't do this looking at him.
"They knew there was mail. I don't know how. I've had months to think about it, and I don't know. I'm never going to know, but they knew mail was coming to that house and they knew who it was from." My hands are flat on the envelope. "So, they came and they asked, and my parents didn't tell them where you were."
He breathes in.
"They didn't tell them." My eyes are burning and there's water on my face, and I let it run. "Either of them. They had my mother on the floor of her own kitchen, and my father could have ended it with one word, and neither one of them said it."
The wall. The desert. The can in the fire pit.
"They died with your address in their mouths."
He doesn't say anything. He's not going to, and it's not because I told him not to.
I put the envelope on the bench between us.
"There were forty-one," I say.
He looks at it.
"Forty-one postcards over ten years." My chest won't fill and I go through it anyway. "Elko. Bullhead City. Winnemucca. Gallup. Some town in Idaho I've never heard of. No return address on one of them, and nothing written on the back of any of them, except the last two."
His hand comes out and stops six inches short.
"On those two you wroteokay." My chin's going and I don't stop it. "That's it. I’ve looked at those two cards for months, and I don't know what you were answering."
He's got his hand hanging over that envelope, and it's shaking so hard I can see it from here.
"There's cash in there too. Not all of it. There's some in there because there's some in every single one." I can't get a breath and I don't wait for one. "And my mother kept the envelopes, Finn. Ten years of envelopes with your handwriting on them, in a fire safe under the stairs, with my passport, birth certificate, twenty thousand dollars, and a piece of paper with your address on it in my father's handwriting."
His head goes down.
"They knew where you were." My voice goes all the way through and comes out the other side in pieces. "For years. They never told them, and they died on the floor of a house you've been paying the taxes on."
The wind comes across the yard.
"So, that's what your postcards bought. My parents’ deaths."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rooster
Church is at nine, and they come get me right on the dot.
Compass does it.
He won’t even look at me.
He comes to the door of my room and knocks on the frame even though it's open. "They want you." He says it to a spot on the wall about a foot to the left of my head.
I stand up. He steps back to let me through and then he falls in behind me down the hall, close, one pace off my shoulder the whole way, like he's walking a man to a bus he's not sure will leave without him.
