Lila considered. Then she nodded and closed her hand.
"Tell me a Papa story," she said. "A true one."
So he told her. He told her about the winter they were nine, when Danny decided the ice on the Burlington Bay was thick enough to walk on and calculated it, with a pencil and a library book, and was right, and walked out to the middle and stood there with his arms up like he'd climbed a mountain, while Tom stood on the shore too scared to follow. He told her about Danny drawing bridges, every bridge in Duluth, drawing them over and over at the kitchen table while their mother cooked supper and said, Danny, dear, move your elbows, and Danny moving his elbows and not looking up. He told her that her grandma Ruth had said dear to everybody, the mailman, the dog, the man who came to read the meter, and that Danny had said it too, when he was little, and kept saying it even when the other boys teased him.
"Mama says it," said Lila sleepily. She had leaned against him at some point. He hadn't noticed when. "She says it to me."
"I heard her," he said. "On the platform. That's how I knew it was really you."
After a while, Lila said, "We need a different one."
"A different what?"
"Goodnight. The platform one is Papa's. You said."
"I did say."
"So we need a just-us one."
"Okay," said Tom. "What should it be?"
Lila thought about it so long he thought she'd gone to sleep. The flashlight in her hand had slipped sideways and was lighting up a sliver of the rug. Outside, the rain was beginning, just barely, to slacken.
"You say, 'Which way is the river going?'" Lila said finally.
"Which way is the river going?"
"And I say, 'Both ways.'"
He turned his head and looked down at the top of her head, at the part in her hair. Sixty miles from the sea, the river ran north on the flood and south on the ebb, and it was the same water all the time, and it went both ways, every day, forever. She was five and three-quarters. She probably didn't know what she'd said. Or maybe she did.
"Both ways," he said. "Yeah. That's a good one, Lila."