"You were right. He gets home." She wiped her nose with the last tissue and folded it into a small square and put it in the pocket of her sweatshirt, because, he thought, there was no trash can within reach and she was the daughter of a man who folded his blanket in halves and then in thirds. "He kills all the suitors, which is kind of a lot, actually, it's very bloody, and then he has to prove to his wife that he's really him, because she's been waiting twenty years and she's not going to just believe some guy. So she tests him. She tells the maid to move their bed, and he gets upset, because he built the bed himself out of an olive tree that was growing in the middle of the room, it can't be moved, the tree is still rooted in the ground. And that's how she knows. Only he would know about the bed." She turned the book over in her hands. "And then he goes to see his father, who's old and working in an orchard, and he doesn't tell him right away who he is, which I thought was mean. And then there's almost another war with the suitors' families, and the goddess Athena stops it. And that's the end."
"That's the end," Lloyd said.
"That's the end of the book. But it's not really the end." She opened the Odyssey again and paged back, a long way, looking for something, and found it, and kept her finger there. "In the middle, when he goes to the land of the dead, a prophet named Teiresias tells him what's going to happen. He'll get home. But after he gets home he has to leave again. He has to take an oar from his ship and carry it on his shoulder and walk inland, away from the sea, and keep walking, until he meets people who have never seen the sea and don't know what an oar is. And when someone sees him and says, what's that winnowing fan you've got on your shoulder — a winnowing fan is a thing farmers use to separate the grain from the — the outside part—"
"The chaff."
She looked at him, surprised.
"My grandmother," Lloyd said. "In the old country. She told me about it once. They did it on the roof."
"The chaff," Lucia agreed. "So when somebody looks at the oar and thinks it's a winnowing fan, that's when he can stop. He plants the oar in the ground and makes a sacrifice to Poseidon, and then he can go home and stay home and grow old." She closed the book again. "He tells Penelope about it the night he gets back. So the reader knows. He's home, but he's not done. He still has to carry the oar."
"Why?"
"Because Poseidon's still angry with him. Because of what he did to the Cyclops." She considered. "That's the real reason. But my dad would have had a different reason. He always had a different reason. He would have said—" and she put on a voice, a little lower, slower, a voice that Lloyd recognized with a shock that went all the way down his spine, because he had heard it say is there any way around that in the frost "—'Lu, it's because he has to walk until he gets somewhere nobody knows what he used to be. Then he can put it down.'"
Lloyd did not say anything for a while.
"You don't always get home," Lucia said, not to him exactly. "In books you do. You were right about that part."
"I wasn't right about anything," Lloyd said. "I said all that to you so I could feel — I don't even know. I said it because someone said it to me once and I've been carrying it around for forty years. That's not an excuse. It's just what happened."