"Did he know my name," Ruth said. "On Thursday. Not the town. Me."
"He said Ruth. He said you live by the lake, which is close enough. He said you have a boy who plans roads. He was not gone, Ruth. That's what I need you to hear even if you hate the rest. He was afraid, and he was angry, and he was himself."
She put her hands over her face. She did not cry yet. Crying would have been a kind of answer, and she did not have one. When she took her hands away, Caleb was looking at the chickens on the towel as if they might offer a procedural suggestion.
"I talked about a number," she said. "The house. I did. Not a listing. A number. I talked about it where he could hear, once, on the phone with Jonah, on the back steps in July. I thought he was asleep. That was arrogant. My whole year has been arrogant in small, defensible ways. I also paid the tax in March when the transfer from the brokerage was late, out of my account, and I didn't tell you because I didn't want a medal and I didn't want a fight. I'll say that too. We are apparently doing an inventory."
"I knew," Caleb said. "The bank statement came. I saw the transfer from you. I didn't thank you. I put the statement in the drawer and I let it turn into evidence that you were buying a vote. That was the meanest thing I've done this year. Maybe not the meanest thing I've done in the last four. I'm not ready to open the whole ledger. I'm ready to say the statement."
"Keep the ledger for tomorrow," she said. "If we open all of it tonight we'll use it to not sleep, and he needs us human in the morning."
Caleb nodded. He stood, and then he did a thing he had not done since they were young and their grandmother died and the funeral mints made them both sick. He put his hand on her shoulder, briefly, a weight without a speech, and took it away before it could become a reconciliation neither of them had earned.
"Lock the door when you come up," he said. "He wanders less than he used to. Still."