"If we go," he had said, "you talk to the banker yourself. I don't stand at your shoulder and feed you lines. If you get there and you don't want it, we leave. If you're doing this to punish her, say so now, and we'll wait until she can hear it."
"I'm doing it because I am afraid," Arthur had said. "Punishment is what fear looks like from the cheap seats. Drive the car."
They had been at Meridian Trust when the doors opened. Brett Lang was young, new enough that he still wore his name tag level, kind in the manner of a person who had been trained in kindness and had not yet had to spend it on a family. He had taken them to the platform, not the conference room. The blinds there were open. The light was flat. Arthur had given the date without being asked. He had spelled Linden. He had said he wanted the March card superseded. He had asked whether Ruth would get a letter. He had said a letter would make a war. Brett had explained, slowly, what removal meant. He had asked Arthur to state, in his own words, why.
Caleb, telling it at the table now, stopped. His hands were flat on the oak.
"I should have stopped it there," he said. "He had the words. They weren't wandering words. Brett looked at me like I was a son who might be coercing a father, and I hated him for the look, and I also knew he'd earned the right to it. I said, 'It's his account.' That's all I said. It was true and it was not the whole truth. The whole truth is I wanted the pen in his hand. I wanted one hour where I wasn't the one who stayed and still had to ask your permission to buy a gutter."
Ruth's throat hurt. "What did he say. When Brett asked why."
"He said, 'My daughter is a good woman who solves things. I don't want to be solved.' Then he signed. His hand shook. The signature looks like it shook. It isn't a fake. If you take it to a lawyer they'll say capacity and undue influence and they'll be talking about real doctrines. They won't be talking about a man who didn't know the pen was a pen. He knew. He looked at me after and said, 'Don't gloat. It's ugly on you.' I wasn't gloating. I was sick. I took him to the diner. He ate toast. He made me promise not to call you until Monday. I broke the promise Friday night. You know that. You didn't pick up. I left a message that said call me, which is the message of a coward. By the time you called Denise, the system had already tripped over itself. So here we are. Two cards. One father. A bank that did its job badly enough to give us a few days of not destroying everything at full speed."
The refrigerator clicked off. The house felt larger than it was.