"Yes." She walked him to the kitchen. The kitchen was a small one with a window that looked out onto the yard. There was a teapot on the stove. There were drawings taped to the refrigerator that Arthur, looking at them, understood to be Ren's.
The drawings were not the drawings of a child who had been drawing all his life. They were the drawings of a child who had perhaps not been given paper in some time and was making up for it. Arthur sat down at the table. Estelle went down a hallway. He waited.
He did not look at his phone. He did not look at his watch. He looked at the drawings on the refrigerator and at the window and at the dog on the porch through the screen of the back door, and he understood with a clarity that surprised him that there was no part of him at this moment that needed anything to happen any faster than it was about to happen. After perhaps four minutes, he heard small footsteps in the hallway. The boy came into the kitchen.
He was wearing a clean shirt that was a size too big for him and a pair of jeans that had been rolled at the cuffs. His hair had been cut by someone who knew how to cut hair. He looked, Arthur thought, like a child. Not like a child who had been on the street since March. Like a child.
"Hello, sir," Ren said. "Hello, Ren." The boy looked at him for a moment. Then he crossed the kitchen and he sat down in the chair across from "Arthur." And he folded his hands very carefully on the table.
The way a child folds his hands when he has been told perhaps recently that this is what a person does at a kitchen table when there is a guest. "Estelle told me you might come on a Saturday." "She told me I might come on a Saturday too." "I'm glad it turned out to be today." "Me too, sir."
A pause, not an awkward one. "Ren?" "Yes, sir?" "How are you?" The boy thought about this.
He thought about it for what Arthur would later remember as a very long time, though it was probably only six or seven seconds. "I am okay, sir," he said. "I think I'm going to be more than okay, but I am okay for now." Arthur did not this time try to keep anything off his face. He let what was there be there.
"That is the best answer to that question I have ever heard, Ren." The boy almost smiled. The smile, like the laugh on the corner of Sycamore and Lyndon, did not quite finish itself, but it got further than the laugh had. Arthur saw it get further. Estelle came in behind them with the teapot.
She set it on the table. She brought three mugs. She poured for all three of them, including the boy whose mug was mostly milk with a small splash of tea to make it the color of the grown-up drinks. She sat down. "All right," she said.
"Now we talk." They talked for two hours. They talked about what Ren was reading, which was a book about a boy who had a fox for a friend, and which Ren had read twice already in the nine days he had been at Estelle's house because he had not until then had a book that was his to read more than once. They talked about Pepper, who was, according to Ren, 14 years old and afraid of the vacuum cleaner and not afraid of thunder, which Ren had decided made Pepper a sensible dog. They talked about the school Estelle had begun the conversations to enroll him in, which was four blocks away, and had a music room with a piano in it that the children were allowed to touch.
They talked about Ren's mother, whose name had been Sarah, and who had liked to sing in the kitchen while she made pancakes on the weekends, and whose voice Ren remembered better than her face, which Arthur understood, having sat with Eli in another life that had not been his, was the way of these things. They did not talk about the tree. They did not talk about the wrist. They did not talk about the conversation Arthur had had with Marcus on Thursday or the trust that was being drafted in his name. Those things were not for this Saturday.
Those things would be for other Saturdays, doled out at the pace of an 8-year-old's understanding with a hand on the lantern and not on the road. When it was time for Arthur to go, Ren walked him to the porch. Pepper opened one eye, considered standing up, and decided against it. The afternoon light was coming sideways through the maple at the corner of the yard, turning the lawn a color that Arthur, who did not have words for most colors anymore because he had not needed them, thought might be the color of honey if honey had a sound. Sir, Ren said.
"Yes." Estelle says you are coming back next Saturday if you would like me to. "I would like you to, if you would like to come." "I would like to come, Ren." The boy nodded once.
He did not hug "Arthur." Arthur had not expected him to. Hugs were for later if they were forever. The boy held out one small hand instead, the way a child holds out a hand when he has been told perhaps recently that this is what a person does on a porch when a guest is leaving. Arthur took the hand.
He held it for a moment. He let it go. "Goodbye, Ren." "Goodbye, sir." Arthur walked down the porch steps and out through the gate of the fence around the yard with the long grass.
He turned at the gate. The boy was still on the porch. He raised one hand. Arthur raised one back. He walked to his car which was parked at the curb and he got in and he sat for a moment with the keys in his hand and he did not start the engine.
He thought about a great many things. He thought about the corner of Sycamore and Lyndon where a tree had fallen on a Tuesday morning eleven days earlier and had missed him by a foot and a half because a child had pulled him backward by the wrist. He thought about the granola bar the boy had not eaten until officer Ray in the front seat of the patrol car had quietly told him he could. He thought about Estelle, who had answered her telephone on the second ring, as she always did, and who was at this moment in her kitchen washing three mugs that two adults and a child had drunk tea from. He thought about Helena in Edinburgh, who had told him on a telephone the previous Tuesday evening to be the hand on the lantern and not the lantern, and who had thereby saved him from the version of this story that would have been about Arthur and not about Ren.
He thought about the years he had spent being irritated about small things in a life that had been, by any honest accounting, extraordinarily fortunate. He thought about the doormen and the receptionists and the nieces he had failed to ask the right questions of, and the brother who had died on a treadmill in Houston, and the wife he had lost because he had postponed and postponed and postponed. He thought about the boy on the porch with his hands still raised, who had been on the street since March, and who had in his nine days at Estelle's house read a book twice and made friends with an old dog and worn a clean shirt that was a size too big for him because Estelle had not yet had time to take him to buy one in his own size, and who had said when Arthur had asked him how he was. "I am okay, sir.
I think I am going to be more than okay, but I am okay for now." Arthur Mercer, who had built a life on the kind of honesty that involved saying what he meant in rooms where most people did neither, said out loud to no one in the quiet of his car at the curb in front of a yellow house with a white porch in a neighborhood he had only ever been to three times in his life. "So am I," he started the engine. He drove home. "