Wednesday, how June had taught him: feel for the dry wood first, then for the green, and never cut more than the plant could spare, because a rosebush, like a house, recovered best when it was pruned by someone who intended to stay. The caregiver listened, and she did not rush him, and when he handed her the shears, she cut exactly where he told her, and she laid the cuttings in a neat pile by the steps, the way June used to, and Silas stood there with his hands on the stems, smelling the green sap and the dust, and he thought that June would have approved of a woman who took instruction from a blind man about his own roses. On Fridays she did the shopping list with him, item by item, reading back what she had written, and she never added anything to the list without asking, and she brought back a receipt for every dollar, and she laid the change on the table where he could count it himself. She also brought the newspaper on Fridays, and she read him the headlines, and then whatever stories he asked for in full, and she never skipped the ones she thought would bore him, because Silas had told her, on her first day, that he wanted all of it, even the dull parts, and she believed him. Once, in the second week, she was running ten minutes late, and she called ahead to say so, and she apologized when she arrived, and Silas told her not to worry, that ten minutes was nothing, and he thought, privately, that a woman who apologized for ten minutes was a woman who understood what it meant to be waited on by someone else's clock.
The old routines came back, and they came back stronger for having been threatened. In the afternoons he listened to westerns for hours, the way he had before, the stories June used to read aloud to him when his eyes were already failing, and now he heard them without listening for footsteps in the next room, without wondering whether someone was keeping track of what he listened to and for how long. He found a new series, about a lawman in the New Mexico territory, and he followed it the way he had followed June's reading, chapter by chapter, and he told Karen about the plot on their Sunday calls, and she teased him about rooting for the outlaw, and he said the outlaw had a point, and they argued about it happily, the way a father and daughter argue about a story when there is nothing else they need to argue about. The talking watch announced the time in its familiar voice, and Silas still called the voice Clara, for no reason he could fully explain even to himself, and one afternoon, when Karen was visiting and the watch announced three o'clock in the middle of a story, Silas laughed and said, "Clara has never sounded so pleased with herself."
Karen laughed too, and then she laughed harder, because it was the kind of joke her father had always made, the kind she had not heard in two years, and hearing it again felt like finding something she had thought was lost for good. The Sunday calls, meanwhile, had become what they should have been all along: long, unhurried, and entirely theirs. Karen called every Sunday without fail, as she always had, but now the calls lasted as long as they wanted — an hour, sometimes more — and Silas told her about the rosebush and the westerns and the new caregiver and the shop, and Karen told him about Chattanooga and her work and the drive down, which she was making more often now, and neither of them watched the clock, and neither of them waited for someone in the next room to decide the conversation was over.
Otis came by the house more often now, too, though never unannounced, and never with an agenda. Sometimes he brought a part for the scooter, sometimes he brought nothing at all, and they sat on the porch and talked about the town and the shop and the weather, and Silas asked him about the motorcycles, and Otis told him about the club, and about Gus and Eddie and Wrench, and about the loan fifteen years earlier that had started it all. Silas listened the way he listened to everything now: fully, without guarding himself, because the house was his again and the people in it were people he had chosen. One evening, after the new caregiver had gone and the sun was going down over the hill country, Silas sat alone in his kitchen, listening to the quiet of his own house, and he thought about the difference between the quiet Paula had imposed on him and the quiet he had now. Paula's quiet had been a locked room. This quiet was an open field. It had room in it for a talking watch and a western on the audio player and a daughter's voice on the phone and a rosebush by the back steps and a photograph on the mantel, adjusted by touch each morning, exactly where June had always displayed it. He sat there for a long time, not lonely, not afraid, just a man in his own house, in the dark that had been his world for six years, and the dark did not frighten him anymore, because it was his, and because he had learned, at eighty-two, that a man could be blind and still see exactly what mattered: who was in his corner, and who was not, and what to do about it.