"Did he get mad?"
"Furious. He said it was physics and he'd figure it out. He drew diagrams. He calculated angles." Tom picked up another stone and handed it to her. "Never got past two."
Lila threw the stone overhand into the river with all her might, plop, and then stood there looking at the ripples, and Nora, sitting on a slab of riprap with her hands in her coat pockets, watched her daughter's face and saw something settle into it. A small, specific, reasonable fact. Papa could not skip stones. This man could. Therefore.
There were others. Lila collected them the way she collected pocket presents. Uncle Tom drank his coffee black, and Papa put three sugars in, which Mama said was disgusting. Uncle Tom had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, faded green, which Papa did not. Uncle Tom said "y'all" sometimes, and when Lila asked him why, he said he'd caught it in Louisiana like a cold. Uncle Tom did not know who Mr. Bernard was. (Mr. Bernard was the giraffe who lived on the top shelf of the coat closet and could only be visited by Papa because he was very shy.) Uncle Tom did not know the platform goodnight.
That one she discovered the third Sunday, at the end of the afternoon, when Tom had stayed longer than usual because it was raining and Nora had, against her own better judgment, offered him soup. Lila was in her pajamas. He was at the door with his coat on.
"Last stop?" Lila said to him.
He looked at her, uncertain. "What?"
"Last stop?" she said again, more insistently.
He looked at Nora. Nora shook her head very slightly, though she didn't know whether she meant don't or I can't.
"I don't know that one, Lila," he said. "I'm sorry."
"You're supposed to say 'Lila Station.'"
"Lila Station," he said obediently.
"And then I say, 'Everybody off?' And you say, 'Nobody off. Everybody stays.'"
He opened his mouth to say it, and then he stopped. Nora watched him stop. He crouched down in the doorway with the rain blowing in behind him.
"I don't think I should say that one," he said. "I think that one was your papa's. I think that was a thing just between you and him. I don't want to borrow it. Is that okay?"
Lila's lip trembled. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, very solemnly, and said, "Okay," and went and stood against Nora's legs.
After he left, Nora knelt in the front hall and held her daughter, and Lila cried, but it was a different kind of crying than it had been, softer, less like falling. "He doesn't know it," she kept saying, as if it were something she was telling herself. "He doesn't know it. Only Papa knows it."
"And you," said Nora. "You know it."