"He's not nothing," Dr. Shah said. "He's also not the man who could manage a surprise a day without cost. Some days will be thinner. Fear will make them thinner faster. If you make every decision in the key of emergency, you will manufacture emergencies. If you pretend nothing has changed since he was seventy, you will miss the step at the side door. I can't pick your signatures for you. I can tell you that on the day I saw him, he could tell me what a signature does. That is not a letter to a court. It's a sentence for this hallway."
Arthur, who had pretended to be fascinated by a poster about flu shots, said, "I can hear the hallway."
"Good," Dr. Shah said. "Then hear this too. You are allowed to change your mind. Changing it is not proof you didn't have one."
They drove home by the long way, past the fields, because Arthur asked to see the hawks. There were two, and he was satisfied, as if the hawks had kept an appointment. In the back seat Ruth watched the side of Caleb's face as he drove, the concentration he brought even to an empty road. She thought of all the roads he had driven alone while she was on conference calls. She did not insult him by announcing the thought. She let it sit beside her like a third passenger who did not yet have a name.
Saturday they cleaned Helen's drawer, not as an exorcism, as a task Arthur gave them so they would have something to do with their hands that was not a card. He supervised from the chair. "That scarf goes to the church," he said. "That letter you may not read. That one you may." The letter they were allowed was a birthday card Helen had never sent, written to both of them the year the tumor was new, the handwriting still a librarian's.
Share him, it said. Do not split him. There is a difference. I have asked him to stop making each of you the audience for the other's failure. He will forget I asked. Remind him. Remind each other. I am not interested in being the patron saint of your grievance. I would like the pear tree looked after. It is a nuisance and it is ours.
Ruth read it aloud because Caleb's voice had stopped. Arthur looked out the window at the tree, which had been trimmed and looked, for the moment, like a citizen.
"She always got the last edit," he said. "Fine. We'll take the note."