He did not move to take it, so she unfolded it herself, carefully, on the empty desk, beside the half-eaten bagel and the laptop that was not hers, and smoothed the two pages flat with the side of her hand. Dot-matrix gray, the font of the old system, the columns she could have recited in her sleep. Date. Time. Reader. Credential. Cardholder. Event.
He came and stood over the desk. He took a pair of reading glasses out of the inside pocket of his blazer, the cheap kind from a pharmacy rack, black plastic, and put them on, and the act of a big, stone-faced man in a security blazer putting on drugstore reading glasses was so ordinary and so intimate that she had to look away from it, out the window, at the leaves.
She knew where he was on the page by his breathing. She heard him get to twenty-one. She heard him get to fourteen. At fourteen he put one hand flat on the desk beside the paper, not on it, and leaned on it, and stayed there a long time, and she did not look. A Connecticut Transit bus went by on Trumbull, its brakes sighing at the stop. When Alvin got to the bottom of the second page he took off his glasses and folded them and held them in his hand.
"Two-forty," he said.
"Yes."
"He was alive at two-forty."
"Yes."
"The medical examiner put the time of death between three and five." He was not looking at her. He was looking at the paper. "They said he went into the stairwell, and he had an attack, and he sat down, and that was it. That he probably didn't know what was happening. A man from the company sat in my living room and said there was no indication of distress. That's what he said to my wife. No indication of distress." He touched the paper then, finally, with one finger, at a line near the bottom of the first page. 2:08. Fourteen. Denied. "That's distress. That's my boy standing at a door asking to be let in."
"I know."
"You know." He turned and looked at her, and it was the first time in seven years that she had seen anything at all in his face, and what she saw there made her want to sit down on the floor. "You knew on Monday. You knew while I was picking out a casket at a funeral home on Albany Avenue. You knew at the funeral. Were you at the funeral?"