She thought about saying more to him on Saturday afternoon and did not. She had already said the useful things. Drink first. Questions second. Do not decide from a jacket. The rest would be character. You cannot lecture a man into character at four o’clock and expect delivery at six-thirty. You can only set the table and stand close enough to grab a sleeve.
Richard washed the already-clean car a second time after lunch. He told himself it was because company was coming. It was because his hands wanted an occupation that did not involve the sentence forming in the back of his mind. The sentence was not one he would have spoken at church. The sentence was about hair and clothes and a job that did not look like a future. The sentence had been assembling itself for weeks in the pauses after Sarah said his name. Richard called the sentence standards. Claire would have called it something else. He did not ask her to name it. Naming it would have required him to hear the name.
At five he changed his shirt twice and settled on the light collar under the navy quarter-zip because it looked like a man who had made an effort without looking like a man who was afraid. He stood in the hall and practiced a handshake in the air and felt ridiculous and stopped. He told himself he would be fair. Fair, in his mouth, still meant he would give the boy sixty seconds to become the person Richard had already decided he should be.
Sarah, in the car five minutes out, touched her necklace again and then forced her hand down. “If I talk too much, kick me.”
“I’m not kicking you in your parents’ house.”
“Then look at me.”
“I can do that.”
She watched the familiar streets come into view, the painted doors, the hoop, the porch light that would click on whether they were ready or not. She thought of the curb where her father had sat with her scraped knee. She thought of the kitchen island and his flat hands and the phone call to the school. She thought, He can do this. He has done harder things.
She was right about the harder things. She was wrong about this one. The harder things had not asked him to change the picture of his own living room. This one would.
There were other Saturdays that could have been this Saturday and were not.