She went up the walk. The flagstones were slick with leaves. She went up the porch steps, the third one complaining the way it always did, and found her key in the pocket of her coat, and opened the front door, and the warmth of the house came out around her like an animal coming to meet her, smelling of radiator heat and the lemon oil she used on the banister and, faintly, under it, the old man's aftershave, Old Spice, the same bottle for four years because he would not let her buy another one.
He was in the chair. The blanket was on the floor, as she had known it would be. The television was showing an old western with no sound, men on horses riding very fast across a desert toward nothing. He had turned the chair, somehow, with his good hand and his good foot, maybe six inches, so that it faced the window more squarely, and he was looking out of it, and he did not look at her when she came in.
"Late," Dermot Sheehan said.
"The car did not come," she said. She took off her wet coat and hung it on the hook by the door. She picked the blanket up from the floor and shook it out and laid it back over his knees, and tucked it in at the side by his bad hand, and he let her, the way he always let her, as though it were happening to someone else. "I walked from the station."
He turned his head then and looked at her, and his face did the thing it did when it wanted to say three things at once and could only manage one. His eyes went from her wet hair to her wet shoes and back up again. Then they went past her, to the window, to the road, to the headlights sitting in the rain at the end of the walk with the engine running and the wipers going back and forth.
"Who," he said.
Solange stood beside the chair and looked out the window with him.
"He stopped," she said.
The old man did not say anything. His left hand moved on the blanket, a small movement, the fingers curling and uncurling, as if they were turning something very small. She knew what it was. She knew what he was going to ask before he asked it, because he had asked it every morning for six weeks, and she was ready, and she found, when he asked it, that she did not have an answer.