"Papa didn't do a fix-it?"
Nora looked at the macaroni. "Eat your dinner, okay? It's getting cold."
Lila ate four bites and then put her head down on the table beside the bowl, her cheek on the solar system, and looked sideways at the coin on the sun. "He smelled wrong," she said, in a small voice. "He smelled like the gas station."
Nora reached over and put her hand on her daughter's hair.
"I thought it was him," Lila said. "I thought he came back."
"I know you did. I know, baby."
"But he's dead." She said the word carefully, the way Bea had taught them both to say it, without any of the soft pillowy words around it. Dead meant his body stopped working. Dead meant it doesn't start again. "His body stopped. It doesn't start again."
"That's right."
"So it couldn't be him."
"No."
Lila was quiet for so long that Nora thought she might have fallen asleep there with her face on Saturn. Then she said, into the placemat, "But it looked like it could."
* * *
After the bath, after two books and a third that Nora read with her eyes half-closed, after the night-light that projected slow blue fish onto the ceiling, Nora stood in the hallway outside Lila's room with her back against the wall and listened until the breathing went long and even.
Then she went downstairs and stood in the front hall in front of the coat hooks.
Daniel's peacoat was still on the third hook. She had given away most of his clothes in the spring, two carloads, including the tragic sweater vests he had loved. But she had not been able to give away the coat. The pockets were empty. She had emptied them herself in September of last year and found a ticket stub, a roll of mints, and a single brass wing nut, which had obviously been destined for Lila and had never gotten there. The wing nut was in the pocket tin now. Lila had put it in herself, with great ceremony, and then had sat on the floor of her room and screamed until she threw up.
Nora put her face into the wool. It didn't smell like him anymore. It smelled like the hallway.
Tom Hale.
She had met him exactly four times. Once in Two Harbors, Minnesota, the first summer she and Daniel were together, when the brothers had thrown each other off their mother's dock into Lake Superior and come up swearing at the cold, and she had liked Tom, she remembered that. She had liked him very much. Once at their mother's funeral, when he'd shown up forty minutes late, smelling of mouthwash, and left before the burial. Once at the rehearsal dinner. And once on the morning of her wedding.