On the stairs behind them a board creaked. They both turned. Caleb was standing on the fourth step from the bottom with the stuffed tyrannosaurus under one arm, and Marcus did not know how long he had been there or how much he had heard.
"Nana Grace asked if you were coming," Caleb said to Marcus. "On the phone. And Mom said she didn’t know."
Danielle closed her eyes.
"That’s why I ran," Caleb said. "When I saw your car. Because she didn’t know."
Marcus crossed the kitchen and went up the three steps and sat down beside his son on the stairs, which put their heads at the same height, and put his arm around him, carefully, below the shoulder, away from the fingermarks.
"I’m here," he said. "You see me? I’m right here."
And it was at that moment, with his arm around his son on the stairs and his wife at the kitchen table with her hands flat on the wood, that headlights swept across the front window, and a car door shut out at the corner, and a voice called Goodnight, Hattie, God bless, and they all listened, without moving, to the slow, steady, familiar sound of Loretta Reed’s church shoes coming up the driveway.
She came in through the garage, the way she always did. They heard her stop. They heard the long silence of a woman standing next to a Highlander with its liftgate open and two suitcases in the back, and then the door from the garage opened and she stepped into the kitchen with her purse on her arm and her Bible in its zippered quilted cover held against her chest.
She was sixty-seven years old and five foot two in her stocking feet, and she had never in Marcus’s memory walked into a room as if she were asking permission to be there. She wore a lavender blouse and a gray skirt and the pearl earrings Harold had bought her for their thirtieth anniversary, and her hair, gone silver at the temples, was set the way she had it set every other Saturday at the shop in Fayetteville. She looked at Danielle at the table. She looked at the passport wallet on the counter. She looked at Marcus on the stairs with his arm around Caleb, and her face did not change at all, except that something behind it closed, like a door at the far end of a hallway.