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She nods slowly, as if I'd said something she'd been waiting to hear for a long time. She folds her hands on the table, knotted old knuckles in a crocheted sleeve.

"I want to tell you about Walt," she says. "He left twice."

I take my hand away from my eyes.

"The first time, nineteen sixty-four, he got orders. He stood on the porch of the little house on Maple with a duffel bag, and I said, 'Fine. Go. I'm easy.' I was so pleased with myself. So brave. He went down the walk, and I watched his shoulders, and I didn't say one word, and he stood at the gate for ten minutes." She almost smiles. "He came back for his hat. That's what he said. He forgot his hat. I gave him his hat, and he left, and I cried for a month, and I told myself it was the price of being easy."

"Grandma."

"The second time, I asked him. Out loud. 'Walt, I want you to stay.' It took me one sentence. It was the bravest thing I ever did, and he cried right there in the kitchen with the dish towel in his hand, because nobody had ever asked him for anything."

She reaches across the table and tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear. "Your mother left because she wanted to, Hollie. That's hers. It's not yours. You decided somewhere along the line that if you were easy enough, nobody would have a reason to go. But the people who leave don't need a reason. It's the people who stay who need one."

She pats my hand once and goes back to her pie.

My phone buzzes against the table. It's Carmen, a single line: Hollis Marie Brandt. Ask for the thing.

I turn it face down and laugh, a wet, broken sound. Ruth pats my hand once more.

She leaves at a quarter past five, with her coat buttoned to the chin and her purse over her arm. At the door she stops. She looks at the porch light, burning yellow against the gold afternoon. At five o'clock in the evening with the sun still on the maples.

"Your light's on," she says.

"I couldn't turn it off."

Ruth looks at me. "Good girl," she says, and goes down the steps.

I clean the brushes. I fold the drop cloth. I eat a second slice of pie standing at the counter. When I flick on the studio lamps and the little space heater, because my fingers have gone stiff with cold, the whole house goes dark with a sharp snap.

I stand there in the gray dusk with a fork in my hand and say, to no one, "In my defense, I was warned."

I find the flashlight in the junk drawer. I go down the hall to the basement door. The stairs smell of cold stone and cedar, with a new smell under it. Sharp and clean, like fresh-cut oak. I come down in the beam, one step at a time, with my hand on the rail. On the last stair, I put my foot out the way I've done a hundred times, braced for the soft lurch, the drop, the lie.

It holds. It doesn't give at all.

I stand with my whole weight on it. The tread under my foot is white oak, planed so smooth that the beam slides across it like water. Someone has fitted it into the stringers with clean, tight joints. Someone spent the whole afternoon on his knees in the cold doing it.

I crouch with a grunt, my knees complaining, and shine the light along the stringer. In the corner, in small neat block capitals, in carpenter's pencil, there's a note.

DOESN'T LIE NOW. —B.

I put my hand over my mouth. I laugh, and it turns, helplessly, halfway through, into something else. I sit on the bottom stair in the dark with a flashlight in my lap and cry as if I'd been saving it up.

When I'm done, I wipe my face on my sleeve, and flip the breaker. The light goes on, yellow and buzzing. I climb the stairs with my hand on the rail.

The house is silent when I come up. I stand in my kitchen against the wall that isn't mine. From the other side, very clearly, I hear his screen door give its long rusted scream. Boots crossing a floor. The heavy thud of a duffel dropped on boards.

I stop breathing.

There's nothing else. I don't hear a car, or a door, or a drawer, or a pipe. Just a man in a half-empty kitchen standing perfectly still.

I put my palm flat on the plaster. It's cool and faintly gritty with old paint. The stove clock says 5:51. The light in the window has gone the color of apricots.

I've never once asked for the thing I wanted most, out loud, in my entire life. I make a fist. I knock three times with the pad of my knuckle, soft, patient, the way you knock on the door of someone you won't wake.

Nothing.

The silence goes on. It goes on long enough that I feel my heart in my wrists. The old familiar voice begins to say what it always says: you've made a mistake, you've made it hard, you've been too much.