She told him what she learned about Caleb Strand, a little at a time, sitting on the back deck on summer evenings while Owen ran through the sprinkler. He had nobody. His sister in Eugene had three kids and a husband who didn't like him. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Colonial Heights over a tire shop and didn't sleep. When he did sleep he woke up in the ditch. He saw Ruiz's face in the window of the cab. He had a medical retirement coming and no idea what to do with the rest of his life. He was supposed to be going to a group at the VA on Tuesdays and wasn't. He had two bottles of pills in his medicine cabinet, one for pain and one for the other thing, and he was afraid of both of them. He told her once, staring at the oak tree, that this house, this yard, was the only place since March where his hand didn't hurt.
She told Daniel she saw what was happening. She wasn't stupid. She knew what it meant when a man started showing up on a Tuesday for no reason, and what it meant that she started looking forward to it, that she started wearing the blue top he had once said was a nice color. She told herself it was friendship. She told herself she was helping him, that Daniel had sent him to her and would want her to look after him. She told herself she was keeping Daniel's soldier alive, which might even have been true, and that was the trouble with it.
Then the derecho came, the night of the twenty-second of June. The sky went green at eight in the evening and the wind came through the county like a freight train, and the big limb of the white oak came down across the back fence, and the power went out on half of Chesterfield. Caleb drove over in the middle of it because he had heard on the scanner how bad it was out their way. He got there after the wind had passed, in a downpour, and spent until midnight with a flashlight and a chainsaw making sure the limb wasn't on the house. Owen had been terrified. The wind, the crack of the oak, the dark had all been too much, and he wouldn't sleep unless Caleb stayed. So Caleb stayed on the couch. He stayed the next night too, because the power was still out and there were downed lines on the street and Owen still wouldn't sleep alone. On the third night, in the dark, in the heat, with the house silent and no fans and no hum of the refrigerator, and her son finally asleep, Claire came downstairs for a glass of water and found Caleb sitting up on the couch, shaking, in the middle of one of the nightmares, and sat down next to him.
She didn't tell Daniel the rest of that night in any detail, and he didn't ask, and they were both grateful.