Outside, the air smelled like rain that had thought about it and like the exhaust of a car idling at the curb. Caleb's Subaru was three spaces from the door, the back seat full of the ordinary evidence of a life: a library tote, a bag of apples from the roadside stand, a folded walker Arthur refused except on bad days. Ruth's rental, a white sedan with an Illinois plate, sat farther down, obedient between the lines. She had not known which car her father would get into. She realized, standing on the concrete, that she had been afraid to know.
Arthur looked at both cars as if they were offers.
"I want the diner," he said. "Not the house. If we go to the house we'll stand in the kitchen and be brave. I'm not brave. I want coffee that tastes like a spoon."
"You can have coffee at home," Caleb said.
"I can have a war at home," Arthur said. "The diner charges extra for that. They put it on a separate check."
Ruth almost laughed. The laugh broke into something else, and she swallowed it. "I'll drive you," she said.
"He came with me," Caleb said.
"I can come with both of you or with neither," Arthur said. "Don't make the car into the card."
A wind moved across the lot and lifted the lapel of his coat. He buttoned nothing. He started walking toward the sidewalk that ran along Market Street, slow, certain of the direction if not of the pace. The diner was four blocks away. He had walked it for forty years, first with Helen, then with the space where Helen had been, then with Caleb half a step behind, pretending they had both simply felt like air. Ruth and Caleb looked at each other. It was the first time since the table that they had looked without a document between them. Caleb's eyes were the same brown as hers. That fact had never been fair.