The appointment was on a Friday afternoon. I started to lose my nerve again when I saw her in her office, her eyes made up with pale green shadows and her hair pulled back in a gold barrette. I don’t believe Cynthia was much older than I was, but you put somebody in high-heeled pumps and sit her behind a big desk and age is no longer an issue-she is more important than you are, period.

“Proof of abandonment is very, very difficult,” she was explaining to me. “In this case, probably impossible. But you’re right, there are legal alternatives. The cornerstone of an adoption of this type would have to be the written consent of the child’s natural parents. And you would need to be named in the document.”

“What if there are no natural parents? If they were to be dead, for instance.”

“Then it would have to come from the nearest living relative, the person who would normally have custody, and a death certificate would have to be presented as well. But the most important thing, as I said, is that the document would name you, specifically, as the new guardian.”

“What kind of document exactly?”

“The law varies. In some states the mother would have to acknowledge her consent before a judge or a representative of the Department of Economic Security. In others, a simple written statement, notarized and signed before witnesses, is sufficient.”

“What about on an Indian reservation? Do you know that sometimes on Indian reservations they don’t give birth or death certificates?”

Cynthia wasn’t the type that liked to be told anything. “I’m aware of that,” she said. “In certain cases, exceptions are made.”

Cynthia’s office was tiny, really, and her desk wasn’t actually all that big. She didn’t even have a window in there.

“Don’t you miss knowing what the weather’s like?” I asked her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t have a window. I just wondered if you ever kind of lost touch with what was going on outside, being cooped up in here all day with the air conditioning and the fluorescent lighting.” It was the first time in my life I’d ever said anything like “fluorescent lighting” out loud.

“As you recall, I came to your house on the evening that your, that April was assaulted.” Cynthia always called Turtle by her more conventional name. “I do my share of field work,” she said.

“Of course.”

“Have I answered your questions, Taylor?”

“Mostly. Not completely. I’d like to know how a person would go about finding the information you mentioned. About the laws in different states. Like Oklahoma, for instance.”

“I can look that up and get back to you. If you like, I can get you the name of someone in Oklahoma City who could help you formalize the papers.”

This took me by surprise. “You’d be willing to help me out?”

“Certainly. I’m on your side here, Taylor.” She leaned forward and folded her hands on her desk blotter, and I noticed her fingernails were in bad shape. It’s possible that Cynthia was a nailbiter.

“Are you saying that you’d rather see Turtle stay with me than go into a state home?”

“There has never been any doubt in my mind about that.”

I stood up, walked around the chair, and sat down again. “Excuse my French, but why in hell didn’t you say so before now?”

She blinked her gold-coin eyes. “I thought that ought to be your decision.”

At the end of my hour I was halfway out the door, but then stopped and came back, closing the door behind me. “Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Can I ask you a kind of personal question? It’s about the cameo brooch.”

She looked amused. “You can ask,” she said.

“Do you have to shop at the Salvation Army? I mean, is it because of your pay, or do you just like rummaging through other people’s family heirlooms?”

“I’m a trained therapist,” Cynthia said, smiling. “I don’t answer questions like that.”

Out in the lobby I stopped to chat with one of the secretaries, who asked where my little girl was today. The secretary’s name was Jewel. I had spoken with her several times before. She had a son with dyslexia, which she explained was a disease that caused people to see things backwards. “Like the American flag, for instance,” she said. “The way he would see it would be that the stars are up in the right-hand corner, instead of the left. But then there’s other things where it doesn’t matter. Like you take the word WOW, for instance. That’s his favorite word, he writes it all over everything. And the word MOM, too.”

Before I had gotten around to leaving the building, another secretary came hustling over and handed me a note, which she said was from Cynthia. It said, “I appreciate your sensitivity in not wishing to discuss April’s custody in her presence. I’m sorry if I have been careless.”

There was also a name: Mr. Jonas Wilford Armistead-along with an Oklahoma City address-and underneath, the words “Good luck!”

All evening, after I’d fed the kids and put them to bed, I paced the house. I couldn’t wait for Lou Ann to get home, but then when she did I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her anything yet. I hadn’t completely made up my mind.

“For heaven’s sake,” Lou Ann said, “you’re making me nervous. Either sit down or wash the dishes.” I washed the dishes.

“Whatever’s on your mind, I hope you get it settled,” she said, and went to the living room to read. She had been reading a novel called Daughter of the Cheyenne Winds, which she claimed she had found in her locker at Red Hot Mama’s, and had nothing whatever to do with Angel being on the Montana-Colorado Circuit.

I followed her into the living room. “You’re not mad are you? Because I don’t want to talk about it?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I just have to think some more.”

She didn’t look up. “Go think,” she said. “Think, and wash the dishes.”

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I was getting used to it. I watched Turtle roll from her side to her stomach and back again. Her eyes rolled back and forth under her eyelids, and sometimes her mouth worked too. Whoever she was talking to in her dream, she told them a whole lot more than she’d ever told me. I would have paid good money to be in that dream.

In the morning I left her asleep and went to Matties to finish an alignment and front-and-rear rotation I’d left undone the previous afternoon. The guy was coming in sometime that day to pick it up. I didn’t look at a clock but it must have been early when I went in because I was already finished and ready to go home before Mattie came downstairs. I hung around a while longer, making coffee and dusting the shelves and changing the calendar (it was still on May, and this was August). I stared for a long time at the picture of the Aztec man carrying the passed-out woman, thinking about whatever Latin American tragedy it stood for. Thinking, naturally, of Esperanza and Estevan. Though I knew that more often than not it was the other way around, the woman carried the man through the tragedy. The man and the grandma and all the kids.

Finally Mattie came down. We had a cup of coffee, and we talked.

Afterward I found Lou Ann and the kids in the park. Turtle was amusing herself by sweeping a patch of dirt with an old hairbrush, presumably Edna’s since it was red, and Lou Ann had momentarily put aside Daughter of the Cheyenne Winds to engage in a contest of will with Dwayne Ray. Lou Ann was bound to win, of course.

“I said no! Give it to me right now. Where’d you get that from?” She grabbed his fist, which was headed on an automatic-pilot course for his mouth, and extracted a dirt-covered purple jelly bean. “Where in the heck do you think he got that? My God, Taylor, just imagine if he’d eaten it!”

Dwayne Ray’s mouth remained in the shape of an O for several seconds, still expecting the intercepted jelly bean, and then he started to scream.