Karen took the longest to come back to me.

I’d expected a flood of apologies. What I got that winter was silence. She stopped calling. On the first of every month, a check for $618 arrived in an envelope with no note. I deposited each one at the bank, where Brittany, who’d been promoted to assistant manager, counted it with a small, solemn nod.

Then, on a gray Sunday in February, Karen showed up at my door. She stood on the porch in a thin coat with her hands in her pockets and no makeup. She looked about twelve.

“Mom. May I come in?”

“Of course.”

She sat at my kitchen table, and I made tea, because that’s what I do with my hands. She held the cup without drinking and looked at the green ledger on the shelf.

“I’ve been in therapy,” she said finally. “Since November. A woman named Dr. Abara, in Kettering. She asked me why I let Brian do it. I said I didn’t know. And she asked, ‘What would you have lost if you’d said no?’”

I waited.

“And I said, ‘Him.’” Her voice cracked. “I said, ‘I’d have lost him.’ I’ve been afraid for thirty years that he’d leave. He’s not a bad man, Mom. He’s weak. And I’ve propped him up and propped him up, and I thought if I ever stopped, everything would…”

“Fall down.”

“Yes.”

“It does, you know,” I said gently. “Eventually.”

She laughed, a short, wet sound. “I wasn’t looking for a reason to stop. I was looking for permission. To say, ‘No, Brian. I’m not doing this.’”

I set down my cup.

“Karen,” I said, “you’ve had that permission for fifty-four years. It was never mine to give you. It’s always been yours.”

She put her head down on my kitchen table, among the toast crumbs, and sobbed.

I laid my hand on her back the way I used to when she was small and feverish, and felt her shaking. Outside, the winter light lay thin and gray across the yard. Pickles jumped up onto the windowsill.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said. “I did a terrible thing. I want to make it right.”

“You’re paying me back.”

“That isn’t it.”

“Then what is?”

She raised her head. Her face was swollen and blotchy and completely honest.

“I’d like to know you,” she said. “Properly. I’ve been your daughter for fifty-four years, and I don’t think I’ve ever once asked what you wanted.”

I looked at her, and I thought of a girl with a gap in her teeth, a woman in a green coat, and a ledger in a drawer, written in pencil.

“I wanted to be asked,” I said.

“I’m asking.”

“I’d like to go fishing.”

She blinked. “What?”

“With Ben. Your father used to take him every summer to the lake at Caesar Creek. Harold’s gone, and I can’t drive that far anymore. I’d like somebody to take us.”

She stared at me. “That’s it?”

“That’s all of it.”

She started to laugh, and then to cry, and then both at once. “I can do that,” she said. “Mom, I can do that.”

We went in April.

It was a bright, cool morning with mist on the water and the redbuds in bloom. Karen drove. I sat in the passenger seat with a thermos of coffee and a bag of Harold’s old fishing lures. In the back seat, Ben, seventeen and long-legged, with his grandfather’s jaw, sat with a tackle box on his knees, grinning.

We parked at the end of a gravel road beside a gray wooden dock. Karen carried the folding chairs. I walked slowly with a cane I’d recently started using. Ben held my elbow.

The three of us sat at the end of the dock with our lines in the water. Nobody talked. A heron lifted out of the reeds. The sun climbed. The water lay flat and brown and still.

After an hour, Ben said in a low voice, “Grandma? I know what happened. Mom told me. About the bank.” He looked out at the water. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not yours to be sorry for.”

“I know.” His voice was thick. “But I wanted to say it.”

I put my hand on his knee. “Your grandfather would be proud of you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re here.”

He laughed, a short, damp sound, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. On my other side, Karen bowed her head.

A while later, Ben’s line twitched. He reeled in a small, silver, indignant bluegill and held it up, flashing in the morning light.

“It’s tiny,” he said.

“Put it back,” I said.

He did. It flicked its tail and vanished.

I thought about Harold in the garden with a tomato in his hand, and about my green ledger, and I thought: there.