Tom wasn't listening to the last part. He was staring at the four pieces of cardstock on his knee.
"She promised," he said, very quietly, to no one.
"Who promised? Promised what?"
He looked at her then, and for a second she had the feeling she sometimes had on the rare nights he talked in his sleep: that he was looking at her from the far end of a long hallway with a lot of doors in it, and all of them were shut.
"Nothing," he said. "It's nothing. Not now, Renee."
"Tom."
"Not now." He swept the pieces off his knee and into his own jacket pocket and sat back in the chair with his hands on his thighs, ten and two, and the band began, and the whole gym rose to its feet in a long rustling wave.
Renee stood because everyone stood. Her legs did not feel like hers. She had been married to Tom Lindqvist for seven years, with him for eight, and she knew every expression he owned, and she had never seen that one, and she found that she could not stop seeing it. It did not look like the face of a man who was worried his daughter would be disappointed. It looked like the face of a man watching a ship come at him sideways in the fog.
Small towns, she thought, can keep a secret for an extraordinarily long time when everyone has agreed it is a kindness. She had lived in Astoria long enough to know that. People here could tell you who'd had an affair in 1974 and whose boat had gone down and why, but they had a sense, too, of what you didn't say in front of a child in the produce section. For ten years nobody had said Dana's name in front of Nora. For eight of them Renee had been grateful.
The graduates came in two by two down the center aisle. Families craned and held up phones. The honors students came first, in their gold stoles, and Nora was at the very front, beside Jess, her chin up, her cap set level, her face composed into the expression she wore at the start of debate rounds, the one Renee privately called the courtroom face.
She passed within four feet of the reserved row. She looked at her father. She looked at her grandmother and her uncle. She looked at the fifth chair, the empty one, with the strip of tape still on its back where the card had been.