"What promise?"
"A promise to myself."
Lila closed her hand around it. "Is it my present?"
He looked at Nora. Nora didn't look back. She was watching a barge creep downriver under the far bluff, a long flat shape pushed by a tug, its running lights just coming on.
"Yes," Tom said quietly. "It's yours. You keep that one."
"Okay." Lila tucked it into the pocket of her corduroys. Then she bent and picked up the conductor's cap and put it on her head, crooked, and took Nora's hand. She was calm now, too calm, with the strange formal composure she sometimes wore when something was too large to be held any other way. "We have to go home now," she informed Tom. "It's dinner. It's macaroni."
"Okay," he said.
"Are you coming?"
"No," Nora said. It came out harder than she meant. She made herself breathe. "No. Not tonight."
Tom was still crouched on the platform. He nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed something he had already known. "Can I—" he said, and stopped. "Nora, I've been trying to find a way to—I got a message from him. From Danny. I got it too late. I wanted to see—I just wanted to ride the train. That's all I was going to do. I was going to ride the train and get off where he got off and then I was going to get back on and go. I didn't think. I'm sorry."
"Why would you ride the train?"
He opened his mouth, closed it. "It's a long story."
"Then don't tell it to me on a train platform in front of my daughter," Nora said, and she turned, and she walked Lila down the stairs and across the little lot and up Ferry Street, past the hardware store and the church with the red doors and the house with the pumpkins already on the steps, and she did not look back to see whether he was watching them go.
Lila looked back. Nora felt her do it, three times, the small hand twisting in hers.
* * *
At home Nora made the macaroni because she'd said she would. She stood at the stove and stirred the orange powder into the milk and butter, and her hand was shaking so badly that the wooden spoon chattered against the side of the pot.
Lila sat at the table with the coin in front of her on the placemat. She had set it on the exact center of the drawing of the solar system, on top of the sun.
"Why did Papa's brother have Papa's face?" she asked.