He sat back down.
"Now," said Gussie, and set her glass down on the little wicker table with a click that made everybody look at her, "there's a practical matter. Ms. Searcy says the county will fine her if there are seven people sleeping in this house, and I like Ms. Searcy, and I'm not going to get her in trouble with the septic people. So I rented the cottage out back. The Sandpiper. It's on the other card. It's mine. It's got one queen bed and fewer stairs and a little porch under the oaks, and it was built, I'm told, for a mother-in-law the owner wanted close but not close-close."
Ramsay let out a breath that was half a laugh.
"I was going to sleep in it myself," Gussie said. "I was going to stay out there and come over for meals and be dignified about it. But I counted those stairs on the way up, and there are twenty-two of them, and the Sandpiper has six." She looked at Lysander. "Six steps. I checked the photographs in the office. So here's what I think. I think a man with ankles like that and a dialysis machine that has to be carried in and out every day should be in the place with six steps. And I think an eight-year-old who can identify a number one jimmy can sleep on a pullout on a screened porch for a few nights and consider it the adventure of his life. And I think I'd like to have the room I paid for in the house I paid for, with my family, for once."
Lysander looked at her. For a moment she saw something cross his face that she had not seen in twenty-six years, something younger and more frightened and more grateful than she knew what to do with, and she looked away from it, out at the sound, because she was not ready for it.
"Gus," he said. "I don't know how to..."
"Don't," she said. "I didn't do it for you. I did it because it's a better use of the floor plan. I was a claims adjuster for thirty-one years. I know a sensible allocation when I see one."
"Close but not close-close," said Ramsay, wiping his eyes, and this time he did laugh, and Sunita laughed, and after a moment, to her own surprise, so did Gussie.
They moved the dialysis machine that afternoon. It took Ramsay and Zinnia two trips on the boardwalk through the yaupon, with Tadeo supervising and Lysander walking slowly behind on his cane, and the six steps of the Sandpiper took him about twenty seconds. Gussie watched from the porch of the Pelican. She did not help. She had decided she was allowed not to help.
Coralie came out of her room at a quarter to five. She had washed her face and put her hair up and she came out onto the porch where her mother was sitting alone with a book she had not turned a page of in forty minutes, and she sat down in the chair Lysander had been in, and she did not say anything for a while.