"I'm not asking for anything," Tom said. "I want you to know that. If you tell me to get on a train, I'll get on a train. I just thought—if she wants to see me, and if you say it's okay, I'd like to be around for a few weeks. That's all. And then I'll go back to work, and you'll have my number. A real number. One that works."
"And if she gets attached? And then you leave?"
"Then I'll call her," he said. "Every Sunday. And I'll come back when I'm off. If you let me."
Nora looked at him for a long time. Over his shoulder, down at the bottom of the hill, the river was gray and wrinkled with wind.
"Sundays," she said. "Not Saturdays. Saturdays are ours."
"Sundays," he agreed.
So on Sundays, through the end of October, Tom Hale came up Ferry Street at one in the afternoon and knocked his three apologetic knocks, and Nora let him in, or else the three of them walked down to the river.
There was a strip of stony beach below the station, past the end of the parking lot, where you could climb down over the riprap and stand at the edge of the Hudson and watch it go by. The river was tidal here, sixty miles from the sea; twice a day it ran upstream, which Lila thought was the funniest thing in the world. "The river is going backwards," she'd say, delighted, every single time, and point at a stick floating north.
It was on the beach, the second Sunday, that Lila discovered he was left-handed.
He was skipping stones. He picked up a flat one, turned it in his fingers, and sent it out across the water, and it went five, six, seven, eight times before it sank. Lila watched it with her mouth open. Then she looked at his hand.
"You did it with that one," she said, accusingly.
"Did what?"
"You threw with your wrong hand."
"That's my right hand. I mean, it's my correct hand. It's my left."
"Papa used this one." She held up her right hand.
"Yeah. He did. I'm a lefty and he was a righty. Mirror twins, the doctor said. Like if you looked in a mirror."
Lila turned this over. "Papa couldn't do that," she said. "The skipping. He tried, and they went plop."
"That's true. He was terrible at it. I used to win every time."