Arthur made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"Lawyers," he said. "Helen said if we ever needed a lawyer for the children we had already lost the farm. We don't have a farm. We have a house with a wet basement and a pear tree that eats the gutters. Same sermon."
He looked at Ruth, then at Caleb, and the look did not choose.
"I want to go home," he said. "I don't want to finish it here. The light is wrong."
Denise nodded as if he had given her a usable instruction.
"Then we stop," she said. "I'll note that both cards were presented, that you began an explanation and did not complete it, and that no change is authorized today. Mr. Ellery, if you want, you can come back without anyone speaking for you. Or with one of them. Or with both. I'll be here Thursday. That's a week from the day on this card, which I realize is not a poetry I should be making, but the calendar is what it is."
She slid a business card to each of them. Ruth put hers in the coat pocket where her boarding pass had been. Caleb held his between two fingers and then put it in the jacket with the chalk. Arthur left his on the table until Ruth, after a moment she would replay, picked it up and put it in his breast pocket, the one with the skipped button beneath it.
They stood. The water glass remained. The two signature cards remained, and Denise gathered them with the care of someone handling objects that had already hurt people. Through the blinds, the parking-lot light shifted as a cloud went over the sun, and the stripes on the mahogany blurred and then came back, thinner, as if the room were trying to decide how many versions of the afternoon it was willing to keep.
In the lobby, the teller line was short. A woman with a toddler was filling out a deposit slip on the high counter, the child knocking a pen against the granite in a rhythm that had no interest in banks. Arthur paused to watch the child. Caleb waited. Ruth waited. None of them was good at leaving a building once a thing had been said incompletely.