Caleb came in and poured the last of the coffee into a mug and then poured it out, as if he had remembered it was old.
"You want the because," he said. "You're going to get it when he's ready. I'm going to tell you my half now, not as a defense. As the part he won't know how to include because he was inside it and I was driving."
"All right."
"Sit down. I'm not doing it standing up. Standing up makes me sound like I'm teaching."
She sat. He sat across from her, in their mother's chair, and noticed, and almost moved, and then stayed, because moving would have made a scene of it.
"Thursday," he said, "started on Wednesday night."
He had been grading nothing, because subs did not grade, but he had been sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of maps the historical society wanted labeled for a display about the flood of '59. Arthur had gone to bed early. The house had been quiet in the good way. Near ten, Caleb had heard the guest-room door and then the sound of the closet, hangers complaining. He had thought it was the cough, or a hunt for the extra blanket. He had given it a minute, the minute he had learned to give, because a man of seventy-eight is allowed to open his own closet without an audience.
The minute stretched. He went down the hall and found the suitcase open on the bed, the good shoes already in it, socks balled the way Helen had taught both children and Arthur had adopted out of loyalty. The Illinois map was folded on top, the crease worn white at Chicago.
"Where are we going," Caleb had said, keeping his voice in the register of ordinary questions.