"Could have," he said.
That was all. Two words. Then he looked past me at Claudette, and something passed between them that I did not understand, and he nodded at her, very slightly, the nod of one man to another across a parking lot, and he said, "Mrs. Severance."
Claudette's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
"I got to get back," Dad said to me. "They're short on second. I told Abernethy I'd pick up the back half." He leaned in and kissed my head again, in the same place, as if nothing had happened, and I smelled the cedar and the mothballs. "Proud of you, kiddo. You know that."
"Dad, I didn't—"
"I know," he said. "Go on. Go have your lunch."
And he walked away across the red carpet in his old wide trousers and his polished work boots with the flash of white sock at the ankle, past the marble columns and the gilt and the families with their phones, and pushed open the brass door with the flat of his hand, and was gone out into the gray November light on Broad Street.
Lunch was at Claudette's house on Lane Avenue, a pale brick Georgian with black shutters and a slate roof and a magnolia in the front yard that had been planted, she liked to say, the spring Eisenhower was elected. Marta, who came in three days a week, had left a cold poached salmon on a silver platter in the dining room, with asparagus and new potatoes. Malcolm Wendt had been invited. He had declined, very graciously, at the door of the theater, because of a client call at one. So it was the two of us at the end of a table that sat fourteen, under the chandelier, with the November light coming in gray through the tall windows and lying across the white cloth like something spilled.
I could not eat. I moved salmon around my plate with the heavy silver fork and kept seeing my father's back going out through the brass doors.
"He'll be fine," Claudette said, without my having said anything. She was cutting a single stalk of asparagus into pieces precisely the length of her fingernail. "He has always been fine. That is his great talent."