"Sure."
"Have you listened to them yet? The voicemails."
Nora looked at the dollhouse. In one of the little bedrooms a plastic father was lying face down on a plastic bed, as if he'd simply fallen there.
"No," she said.
"Okay," said Bea gently. "That's okay. I just wondered."
* * *
He came to the house on Wednesday.
Nora had known he would. She'd felt it coming the way you feel weather, a pressure behind the eyes. Still, when the knock came at 4:15 in the afternoon, three soft raps, almost apologetic, she stood very still in the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands and could not make herself move.
Through the window in the front door she could see the shape of him on the porch. He had a cardboard box under one arm.
Lila was in the living room building a tower out of library books. Nora heard the tower stop.
"Stay there," Nora said. "Lila. Stay right there, please."
She went to the door and opened it and stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind her, and they stood there, the two of them, in the thin October light, with the Halloween wreath she'd bought at the drugstore rustling on the door between them.
He looked worse than he had on the platform. He'd shaved, badly; there was a nick on his jaw. In the daylight she could see the differences she hadn't been able to see on Friday. He was thinner than Daniel had been. His hands were bigger, or seemed so, chapped across the knuckles, with an old white burn along the edge of one palm. There was gray at his temples that Daniel had not lived long enough to get. Everything about him looked used, the way a tool looks that has been left in the bed of a truck.
"I'm not going to stay," he said. "I just wanted to bring you something. And to say I'm sorry about Friday. I should've thought. I didn't think."
"What's in the box?"
"Some of his stuff. From when we were kids. When Mom died I took everything from the house and put it in storage in Two Harbors, and I never went through it. In March I went up there and I went through it." He looked down at the box. "There's his science fair ribbons. A bunch of his drawings. He used to draw bridges. When he was eight he drew every bridge in Duluth. You probably knew that."
"No," said Nora. "I didn't know that."
He held it out. After a moment she took it. It was lighter than she expected.