his canvas shoes were swollen, and he leaned on a cane with a rubber foot. His hair was white and still all there, which seemed unfair. His eyes were the same. Gray, with a darker ring. Coralie's eyes.
"Gus," he said.
"Lysander."
"I'll go," he said. He said it at once, before anybody else could say anything, like a man who had rehearsed it. "I'll pack the car. Tadeo and I can be gone in an hour. There's a motel in Buxton. Or we'll drive back tonight. I didn't know. I swear to you I didn't know you didn't know. I asked. I asked the first night."
"I know you asked," said Gussie. "Sit down."
"Gus, I..."
"I have driven nine hundred miles," Gussie said, "and I have sat on a dock and caught a number one jimmy with an eight-year-old who thinks the sun rises and sets on you, and I'm sixty-nine years old and I'm tired and I'm holding a glass of iced tea that my daughter-in-law poured for me, and I would like everybody on this porch to sit down, please, because I'm not going to be the only one sitting, and I'm not going to stand."
Lysander sat down. Ramsay sat down. Sunita sat on the arm of Ramsay's chair. Coralie stayed standing by the screen door for one second longer than everyone else, and then sat on the floor of the porch with her back against the wall and her knees up, the way she used to sit on the kitchen floor when she was small and something was wrong.
Gussie sat down in the wicker chair in the shade and drank half her iced tea.
"Here is what I know," she said. "Yesterday morning a nice woman named Petronella Searcy called me to confirm my six-person booking. She told me my party had checked in. She told me an L. Bennet signed the agreement. And she told me, after looking at the driveway camera, that there were six people in the house, including a little boy I'd never heard of. Then last night somebody called me from the roof and told me the rest of it. I'm not going to say who. That person was the only one in this family who did the right thing yesterday, and I won't have them get any grief for it."
Ramsay looked toward the outdoor shower, where Zinnia's voice and Tadeo's voice were rising and falling over the bucket. He looked back at his mother, and his face crumpled, briefly, and then smoothed, and he nodded.
"So I know what you did," Gussie went on. "I know you moved me to Wednesday and told me it was the audit. I know you planned to bring your father down for the first half of the week and then send him home and bring me down for the second half