I looked at Ruth. She’d raised three boys and fostered two others, and she wasn’t easily unsettled. She shrugged slightly and waited for my decision.
“I’ll keep her home,” I said. “I’ll call the salon.”
Ruth tucked the crackers into her purse. She blew Nora a kiss, wishing her well. Nora hid her face against my legs.
Ruth was Grant’s mother. Grant and I’d married two years earlier, and his steadiness still sometimes caught me by surprise. He worked an early shift at the Corvette plant, came home as he said he would, and never made me guess which version of him would walk through the door.
Dalton, my first husband, was the opposite.
Initially, he was charming and adventurous. By the time Nora was born, he appeared angry at everything: his job, his mother, the dishes, me. I escaped with Nora and two bags of clothing.
