She wanted him to insist just enough that accepting wouldn't feel like choosing.
The confusion made her angry.
“Why?” she demanded.
Arthur looked at her.
“Why would you do that?”
He seemed to consider several answers and dislike all of them.
“Because you're twelve,” he said at last. “And lunch shouldn't cost you your bicycle.”
Maisie looked away before he could see her face.
Across the square, a woman stepped off a bus carrying a cloth bag and a red umbrella. Arthur saw her and rose so suddenly the envelope slid from his knees.
Papers spilled across the pavement.
Maisie caught one beneath her shoe before the wind took it.
The woman hurried toward them.
“Arthur? I'm so sorry. The bus broke down outside Dayton, and my phone—”
She stopped when she saw the papers.
Arthur was already kneeling, gathering them with hands that did not seem quite steady.
Maisie picked up the page beneath her foot.
It was a photocopy of a form. Most of the writing meant nothing to her. Then she saw a name she knew.
Grace Parker.
Her grandmother's name.
Maisie frowned.
“Why do you have this?”
Arthur looked up.
She held the page out of his reach without meaning to.
“Why is my grandma's name on your paper?”
The woman with the umbrella stopped breathing for a second. Or seemed to.
Arthur rose slowly.
“Your grandmother?”
“Yes. Grace Parker. Unless there's another one.”
“What is your mother's name?”
Maisie suddenly wished she had not said anything.
“You said you wouldn't do anything.”
“I won't. I only—”
“Why do you want to know?”
The woman stepped forward, then stopped at a respectful distance.
“My name is June Harlow,” she said. “I used to work at the county library. Arthur asked me to help him find some old records.”
“What records?”
“About a family.”
“Mine?”
June looked at Arthur.
He was staring at the bicycle as if it had become something impossible.
“Maybe,” he said.
Maisie felt the first real fear of the morning.
She handed him the paper and reached for the handlebars.
“I have to go.”
Arthur did not move to stop her.
“Maisie,” June said gently. “Does your mother know you're here?”
That question again.
“She knows I went out.”
“What is her name?”
Maisie looked from one adult to the other.
There were people all around them. A man feeding parking meters. A mother carrying a toddler. The bakery door opening and closing. She could shout if she needed to.
“Nora,” she said. “Nora Parker.”
Arthur's face changed.
Not happiness.
Something more frightening because it seemed to hurt him.
“When was she born?” he asked.
Maisie pulled the bicycle backward.
“Why?”
June put a hand on Arthur's sleeve.
“Slow down.”
He looked at her, then at Maisie, and seemed to hear himself for the first time.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “You're right. You shouldn't answer questions from me. Not without your mother.”
Maisie kept one hand around the grip.
“What do you want with her?”
Arthur looked down at the page bearing Grace Parker's name.
“I don't know how much she knows,” he said.
“About what?”
He lifted his eyes.
“About the day she was born.”
The square had gone quiet inside Maisie's head. She could still see people moving, but they looked far away.
“My mom was adopted,” she said.
June closed her eyes briefly.
Arthur sat down on the bench as if his legs had given way.
Maisie looked at him, at the brown envelope, at the papers he had been carrying before she arrived with her sign and her terrible plan.
“You know something,” she said.
He nodded.
“What?”
Arthur's voice was barely louder than the leaves.
“I think your mother may be my daughter.”
Maisie did not believe him.
Believing him would have required a different world from the one she had walked into that morning. In her world, her mother had a father who died seven years ago and a mother who lived outside Cincinnati and sent birthday cards with five-dollar bills tucked inside. There were photographs of them at Christmas. There was a chipped blue mixing bowl Grandma Grace insisted no other bowl made decent biscuits.
There was no room for a stranger on a bench.
“No,” Maisie said.
Arthur nodded as if she had given him information rather than refused his.
“I understand.”
“No, you don't. My mom has parents.”