“Fine means late,” Emily said.
“See? You do know things,” Toni said, and bumped her shoulder, lightly, so the bins would not slosh, and they finished the hour without further biography.
She drove to Cedar Avenue with the windows cracked and the smell of the diner still in her hair. The maple had done what the maple always did in October, which was to make the walk a problem of keys and slippery intentions. Thomas Harlan had swept some of them and then, she could see, had stopped, because the pile at the edge of the step was more honest than a finished job. He was in the kitchen when she came in, heating soup he did not need, because the aide had left a refrigerator full of reasonable meals and he preferred a soup he had chosen himself. His right hand held the wooden spoon well enough. The fingers closed late, a beat behind the thought, but they closed. He looked at her with the pleasure of a man who has been pretending not to watch the clock.
“You look like you talked to somebody,” he said. His speech was clear tonight. The gaps came when he was tired or when the subject was a feeling he had not rehearsed. “Not the bad talking. The kind that moves the furniture.”