"Watch?"
She looked at the car.
"It's coming," she said. "I think."
She went into the kitchen. She did not turn on the overhead light. She turned on the small light over the stove, the way she did at night, and she filled the kettle at the sink and set it on the burner and lit the gas, and the blue flame came up with its soft whump. She took down cups from the cabinet. One for herself, the white one with the chip. One for him, the heavy green one with the handle he could hold. She stood with her hand on the cabinet door, and then she took down a third, a brown mug with the Metro-North logo on it, faded nearly to nothing, that had been at the back of the shelf for four years, and that she had never seen anyone use, and she set it on the counter beside the other two.
Through the kitchen window, past the end of the porch, she could see the glow of the headlights on the wet road. She did not go to look. It was not hers to look at.
The kettle began to tick as it heated. The rain went on. Somewhere out in the dark beyond the ridge, very far away, a freight was moving on the line, slow, long, a sound so low it was more in the floor than in the air.
Then, under the rain, the engine of the car went quiet.
Solange stood very still by the stove with her hand on the counter. She did not turn around. In the front room the old man did not make a sound. The headlights were still on; she could see them on the road. The engine was off. That was all. That was all she knew. A man could turn off his engine and sit in the dark for an hour. A man could turn off his engine to think, and then turn it back on again and drive to the turnaround and back down the hill and go on with his night, and the hand in the window would come up an inch and go down again, and tomorrow there would be another night.
She listened. She stood in the kitchen of the house where she lived, in the warm, with three cups on the counter, and listened for the sound of a car door, or the third step of the porch, and she found that she was counting under her breath the way she counted the turns of a watch crown, slowly, without meaning to, in her mother's language, one, two, three, as if the counting could hold something steady while it wound.