"Dad," Caleb said, softer than the card had been.
"I'm not wandering," Arthur said. "I'm telling you the room is the same room. Don't look at me like I can't see a table."
Ruth sat. The coat collar was hot against her neck. She had practiced, on the plane, a speech about joint ownership and about the danger of a single signer when a person was seventy-eight and had missed two neurology appointments. The speech required her father to be a fact. He was looking at her now with the irritation of a man who had been spoken about in his presence, which he had, and she felt the speech go out of her like a tide that had misread the moon.
"March was real," she said. "I was here. You asked me to come in with you. You told the woman at the desk you wanted me on the household account and the brokerage and the savings. You made a joke about me finally learning to balance a checkbook. You were—" She stopped herself before the word clear. She would not put that word in the room. It was a trap with her brother's name already on it. "You knew the day. You knew my middle name when they asked. You spelled Linden with the i in the right place, which you were proud of, because the man in front of us had spelled it with an e."
"I remember a man who couldn't spell the town," Arthur said. He almost smiled. The smile frightened her more than a blank face would have, because it was precise. "He had a Bengals hat. He wrote Linden like the tree, linden, and then he put an e on it anyway, like the tree had done something to him."
Caleb looked at the Thursday card and not at the memory.
"Thursday he knew the day too," he said. "He told Brett the date before Brett said it. He read the form. He asked what happened to a signer who was taken off, whether she got a letter. He didn't want a letter. He said a letter would make a war."
"And you didn't think that was a reason to wait," Ruth said.
"I thought it was a reason he knew what he was doing."