He felt that one land. He supposed he deserved it. "It wasn't," he said. "But I said yes to it. So that's the same thing, almost. You're right." He fitted the jaws of the cutters around the shackle and leaned on the handles, and the brass gave way with a sharp little snap, and the lock fell into his palm in two pieces. He opened the pantry door. Inside there was cereal, pasta, crackers, peanut butter, cans of soup, a bag of potato chips, three kinds of cookies, and a jar of the expensive almonds Celeste liked. Skyler looked at all of it for a long time without moving.
"It's yours," he said. "All of it. All the time. There's no shelf, and there's no top or bottom, and nobody counts anything. Okay?"
She nodded. But she still did not move, and he understood that a door being open was not the same as believing it would stay open, and that this was going to take time, and that time was a thing he was going to have to give her a great deal of.
So instead he said, "You know what's still out on the deck?"
The caterers had left the crabs. There had been far too many, the way there always are at parties where the hostess orders for the picture in her head instead of for the people, and the caterers had swept the unpicked ones into a big aluminum pan, still heavy with seasoning, and covered it with foil and left it on the end of the long table with a note that said, Leftovers, sorry for everything. The brown paper was still down. The mallets were still lying where people had dropped them. The hydrangeas had begun to droop.
He turned on the string lights along the deck rail and pulled the foil off the pan and set two chairs side by side at the end of the table, the same end where she had been standing three hours before, and he sat down in one of them and pointed at the other.
"I believe," he said, "somebody saved me a seat."
She sat down. She was still wearing the blue dress. He got up again and went inside and came back with one of his old fleece jackets from the hall closet, and she put it on over the dress, and the sleeves came down past her fingers and she had to push them up to her elbows. He put two crabs on the paper in front of her and two in front of himself, and a roll of paper towels between them, and a cup of vinegar, and he picked up a mallet.
"Ready," he said. "Go."
She was faster. She was always faster. She flipped the first crab on its back and found the apron with her thumbnail and pulled it, and lifted off the top shell in one clean motion, and scraped away the gills, the dead man's fingers, with the side of her thumb, and snapped the body in half and began working the backfin meat out in long white pieces while he was still trying to get the shell off his first one. She did not even look at her hands. Her mother had taught her when she was five, sitting on a phone book, and her hands remembered everything.