She was already coming down.
She must have been at the window. She must have been at the window since Carter had called her from the kitchen phone an hour before, whispering, while his father stood in the carport jingling his keys, and said, We might come, I don't know, he says maybe. She came down the stairs holding the railing the whole way, in the blue dress from the bus stop, with her hair pinned up properly this time, and she was carrying something flat against her chest with both arms, and when she reached the bottom she stopped by the dry fountain and couldn't seem to go any farther.
His father crossed the street. Carter followed a few steps behind and then stopped at the curb, because he understood, without anybody telling him, that the rest of the way wasn't his to walk.
His father went through the gap in the oleander and into the courtyard and stopped about six feet from her.
They looked at each other.
Carter had seen a lot of reunions on television. Mostly on soap operas, the ones his mother watched with the sound low when she couldn't sleep, people running at each other in slow motion with music. It wasn't like that. Nobody ran. The wind was picking up, rattling the oleander, lifting the edge of the old woman's dress. A few fat drops of rain hit the dry concrete bowl of the fountain and left dark coins the size of quarters.
"Hello, Mom," his father said.
Her face did the same thing it had done in the bus shelter when Carter said his name. Everything stopped, and then everything moved at once.
"Carter," she said.
He flinched. Carter saw it. Not much. Just a little, the way you would if somebody touched a bruise you'd forgotten you had.
"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I know you — the boy said it's Ray. I'll call you whatever you—"
"No," his father said. "It's—" He stopped. He looked at the ground. He looked at the sky, which was going dark green in the west. "I don't know what it is. I haven't heard anybody say it in twenty years. Except about him." He nodded back toward the curb, toward Carter, without looking. "Say it again."
"Carter," she said.
He nodded. His jaw was working.
"I saw you," she said. "In 1979."