I put the phone down." She turned the letter over in her fingers. "So before anybody on this porch apologizes to me again, I want to say that I'm not sure I'm owed as much as everybody thinks. You all scheduled around me. I scheduled around all of you. Nobody in this family asked anybody anything for six months. We just moved people around like furniture and hoped it would come out to the right number."
"It did come out to the right number," said Ramsay, a little helplessly. "Six. It just came out to the wrong six."
"It came out to Tadeo," said Gussie. "I'm not sure that's the wrong anything."
Down by the outdoor shower Tadeo was explaining to Zinnia, at the top of his lungs, the difference between a jimmy and a sook, which had to do with the shape of the apron on the underside of the crab, and which he was demonstrating with great care while the crab tried to remove one of his fingers. Everyone on the porch listened to it for a while, because it was easier than looking at each other.
"He's been good to that boy," Sunita said finally, quietly, to no one. "You should see them. He cuts his sandwiches into triangles."
Coralie lifted her head off her knees. "He never cut mine," she said. It came out flat, not cruel, just true, a fact set on a table. "He never once came to a thing at my school. Not one. I did the science fair for six years in a row and he never came."
Lysander turned in his chair to look at her. It cost him something. Gussie could see it in the way his hand tightened on the cane.
"I know," he said. "I know I didn't."
"So why him? Why does he get it?"
"Because I'm out of time to be the other kind of man," said Lysander Bennet. "I used it all up. I used it up on you and your brother and your mother, and I don't get it back. I know that. And then there was this kid downstairs whose mother works doubles, and he was sitting on the steps one day after school because she'd gotten held up and he didn't have a key. And I thought, well. I can't fix the science fairs. But I can let a kid sit inside and have a grilled cheese." He looked down at his swollen ankles. "It isn't for you, Coralie. I wish it were. It isn't payment. It doesn't pay anything back. It's just the only thing I had left to do that wasn't wrong."
Coralie stared at him. Her mouth worked. Then she got up off the floor of the porch, quickly, the way she did everything, and went inside, and the screen door banged behind her, and a moment later they heard the inside door to one of the bedrooms close, not slammed, just closed.
Lysander started to get up.
"Leave her," said Gussie. "Not forever. For an hour. She's my daughter. She needs an hour with a door shut before she can say anything true. She's needed that since she was four."