He sat there holding it. Then he nodded, and he tucked it under his arm, and he shook my hand on the way down the steps. He held on a second longer than he needed to.
After he drove off, the two of us sat on the porch a while. The corn across the road had started to turn gold at the edges. The air was finally cooling down. Somewhere out past the tree line, a combine was running.
“I used to tell people you just answered phones,” I said.
I had been carrying that for a month. Longer than that. Most of my life, really. It came out sounding exactly as small as it was.
She didn’t look hurt. She looked like she was thinking it over, the way she’d think over a crossword clue.
