The woman with the green eyes looked at me standing there on the porch steps, and her keys slipped out of her hand into the gravel, and she started to cry.

“Bernard?” she said.

Barely a sound at all.

Ruby.

My little sister Ruby, who used to fall asleep on my arm, grown now, weeping in my driveway.

I didn’t say anything.

There weren’t words for it and I didn’t try to find them.

I came down the porch steps three at a time and crossed the distance that twenty-six years and a sealed file and nine foster homes had put between us, and I got all three of them into my arms at once, and we stood in the gravel in the warm afternoon and held on and cried and did not let go for a long time.