They had still been fast enough.
He dried them. He picked up the honor roll from where he'd left it on the dining room table and smoothed it flat again with the side of his palm and carried it into the kitchen.
He stood in front of the refrigerator with it for a while. He thought about the space above the handle. He had a magnet already picked out in his mind, the plain black square one from the insurance agent, the kind that would hold anything.
Then he put the certificate down on the counter beside Josie's cold plate of rice, face up, and did not hang it.
It wasn't his to hang. He had done enough with his hands tonight. If he put it on that door, it would be him who had put it there, and every time the girl opened the refrigerator for milk she would see the night it came from. He knew that much. He knew it the way he knew the step out of the garage was broken: from having fallen through it.
He turned off the radio. The house went silent around him. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed.
He took his cane from the back of the chair and went to sit on the porch in the cold, where he had been sitting every evening since June, and he did not turn on the porch light.
***
In the room at the end of the hall, Benji would not get into his own bed.
"I want to sleep in yours," he said.
"You kick," said Josie.
"I won't kick."
"You always kick."
"I won't *tonight*."
She let him. He climbed in against the wall with his white shirt still on, the sleeve stiff where he'd wiped his nose, and pulled the comforter up to his chin and lay there with his eyes open. Josie lay on the outside in her sweater. She hadn't changed either. She didn't want to take it off. It felt like taking it off would mean the day was over, and she didn't want the day to be over in this shape.