"Mr. Johnson," said Starla Beasley.
"You came."
"I said I would." She took his arm and walked him to a chair, and he sat, and put his hands flat on the table, which was the same kind of table, cheap and laminated and a little sticky at the edge. She sat down across from him. "Shawnda says hello. She says if you think sitting in on my sessions means you're not retired, you're welcome to think so. She says she'll pretend not to notice."
"That's good of her."
"She also says you can't see the cards and I can, and that's the right way around for once." Starla was quiet a moment. "I made new ones. I wrote them out last night at the kitchen table. Treyson came home and found me doing it and asked me what on earth, and I told him. I mean I told him all of it. Everything. He's twenty-four. I don't know why I never did." Her voice wobbled and steadied. "He said he always wondered why I had a ruler in my purse."
Arvel smiled. "What else did he say?"
"He said, 'Mama, that's the best thing I ever heard,' and then he ate the rest of the meatloaf." She laughed. "So that was a good night."
They sat. The clock on the wall above the door, which Arvel could not see but could hear, ticked with the slightly hitching tick it had always had, as if it were a little out of breath. At seven o'clock nobody came. At five past seven Starla took her phone out of her blazer pocket and looked at it and put it back without saying anything. At ten past, Arvel reached into the left pocket of his jacket and took out the rubber-banded stack of index cards, out of habit, and set it on the table in front of him, and folded his hands on top of it.
"He might not," Starla said.
"He might not."
"I went back and forth on whether I should even have said anything. Maybe it's not mine to fix. Maybe he's going to hate me."
"Maybe," Arvel said. "You hated me for about four months."
"I did not."
"You threw a workbook at my head."
"At the wall."
"It was near my head."
She laughed again, and wiped her eyes, and then they both stopped, because there were footsteps in the hall.
They were a young man's footsteps, fast and then slower, and then very slow, the way a person walks when they have counted the doors and are not sure they want to have counted right. They stopped outside. For a long moment there was nothing.