She cried then, quietly, the way adults cry when they are not trying to hide it and not trying to perform it either. Silas reached across the table and found her hand, and held it, and they sat like that until the light changed on his face and the kitchen went cooler, and he told her, plainly, that he forgave her, and that there was nothing to forgive, and that both of those things could be true at once, which is the way forgiveness usually works when it is real.
After that, the shape of their weeks changed. The Sunday call did not go away — it was too much a part of their lives, and too good a habit, to throw out — but it stopped being the only thread between them. One Sunday Karen called, and the next Sunday she came, and the Sunday after that she called again, and the rhythm of it became something Silas could count on the way he counted on sunlight through the kitchen window. The calls lasted as long as they wanted to last now. Nobody hovered. Nobody said he was resting. Nobody cut a conversation short. Sometimes they talked for ten minutes, about groceries and weather and the western Silas was listening to. Sometimes they talked for an hour, about June, about the house, about the years before the blindness, about the years after it, about everything they had not said while a third person stood between them.
The first time Karen came for a whole weekend and not just a Sunday, she arrived on a Friday evening with a bag of groceries and a list, and Silas heard the list in her voice before she read it — the carefulness of a daughter who was still learning how to help without taking over. They cooked together on Saturday, and Silas showed her, without making a lesson of it, how he moved through his kitchen: the bowls on the second shelf, the knives in the drawer by the stove, the way he measured by hand and by habit, the way he knew the coffee was ready by the smell and not by any timer. Karen watched, and then she stopped watching and started handing him things before he asked, and by supper they were working the way people work when they have known each other a long time and have only recently remembered how.
That weekend, too, Attorney Wren called, and Karen put the phone on speaker at the kitchen table, and the three of them — Silas, Karen, and the attorney's voice from Chattanooga — went over the last of the papers, the restitution schedule and the account protections, line by line, until Silas could repeat back what each page meant in his own words. Wren said she had handled cases where the victim never got to say any of it, and that Silas saying it, plainly, at his own table, was the reason the case had held together. Silas thanked her, and then he said, with a small dry laugh, that he had spent two years being spoken for, and he intended to spend the rest of his life speaking for himself, and Wren said she thought that was an excellent plan, and that the law would be there if he ever needed it again.
It was late on one of those Sundays, with Karen packing her bag for Chattanooga and Silas sitting in his chair by the window, that she asked him the question she had never quite asked, not in the shop, not with the deputy, not with the attorney. She asked him what had happened in the minutes in Otis's shop, on the Tuesday, when he decided to speak.
Silas was quiet for a long time. Then he told her, in full, for the first time, the way he had never told it to anybody, not even to Otis, not even to himself in quite this order. He told her about sitting in the waiting area with his hands folded, listening to Paula's car leave the lot, and understanding, all at once, that he was alone with a stranger for the first time in longer than he could remember, and that the aloneness was not frightening but clarifying. He told her about the screwdriver stopping, about Otis saying "Take your time," about the careful questions, about the writing down of details, about the three words — "I believe you" — and the way something in his shoulders had come down from where it had been braced for months, as if a weight he had forgotten he was carrying had finally been set on the ground.
I thought, Silas said, "that if I said it out loud to one person, and that person believed me, then it would be real, and if it was real, then I would have to do something about it, and I was afraid of that. And then I said it anyway. And he believed me. And everything after that was just people doing what they said they would do."
Karen sat down on the arm of his chair, and put her hand on his shoulder, and said that she was glad he had said it, and glad he had said it to Otis, and glad, most of all, that he had said it at all. Silas nodded, and he smiled, and he said that he was glad too, and that June would have been proud of him, and that he was, for the first time in a long while, proud of himself. And then Karen went out to her car, and drove the four hours back to Chattanooga, and Silas stood on his porch with his hand on the new rail, listening to her go, and the house behind him was his, and the road in front of him was open, and Sunday would come again, as Sundays do, with a voice on the line or a car in the drive, and either one would be enough.