The Sunday calls narrowed next. Karen called every Sunday without fail, and for a long time those calls had been the spine of Silas's week. After Paula came, they somehow always seemed to catch Silas already resting, already unavailable, already somehow never able to talk as long as he used to. Paula answered, warm and efficient, and told Karen her father was napping, or had just sat down to eat, or was tired from the day, and Karen — four hours away, not wanting to be a burden either — would call back, and the conversation would be shorter, and Silas would hang up feeling as though he had missed something he could not name. One Sunday in particular stayed with him, though he could not have said which Sunday it was, only that the light had been low and gold through the kitchen window and the house had smelled faintly of the roast Paula had cooked. The phone rang, and Paula answered it in the kitchen, her voice warm, and Silas heard her say, "He's just sitting down to supper, honey, can he call you back?" and he heard the pause, and Karen's voice, small through the receiver, saying of course, and then the click, and Paula setting the phone down and telling him Karen had called and would call again later. Later, Karen did call, and the conversation lasted barely ten minutes, and Silas hung up feeling as though he had missed something he could not name, as if the call had happened in another room and he had only heard its echo. He asked Paula, that evening, whether Karen had seemed all right, and Paula said she had seemed fine, just busy, just tired, the way daughters get when they live four hours away and have lives of their own. Silas believed her, because he wanted to believe her, and because the alternative — that his daughter's calls were being shortened on purpose — was a thought he did not yet have the words for. But the Sundays kept coming, and the calls kept shortening, and the feeling kept growing: that the phone, like the mail and the money, had become something that passed through Paula's hands first, and that what came out the other side was thinner than what had gone in. He began to count the Sundays, the way a man counts anything he is afraid of losing, and he noticed that the calls that once lasted an hour now lasted twenty minutes, and then fifteen, and then barely ten, and that Karen's voice, when he did hear it, sounded farther away each time, as if the line itself had stretched between Chattanooga and Larkspur Road, and as if someone were standing in the middle of it, deciding how much of his daughter he was allowed to hear.
After the threat, the two months passed in a particular kind of quiet, the kind that is not peace but waiting. Silas kept his routines — the photograph adjusted each morning, the sunlight telling him the time, the westerns in the afternoon, Clara announcing the hour — but the routines felt thinner now, as if they belonged to a man who was borrowing his own house. He stopped asking about Karen's visits, and he stopped asking about the mail, and he stopped asking about the account, and each thing he stopped asking about became a small room in the house that he no longer entered. He told himself Paula was right, that staying quiet was the price of staying home, and he almost believed it, on the good days. On the bad days, lying awake in the dark, he thought about the pen in his hand at the bank, and the paper that had felt too smooth, and the voice that had told him to stay quiet, and he wondered how a man could sign his name to something and lose, a little at a time, the life that name had stood for.
He began to dread Sundays a little, not because he did not want to talk to his daughter, but because the calls had become another thing that happened to him rather than something he chose.
The turning point came two months ago, on an evening when Silas mentioned, mildly, that he would like Karen to visit more often. He had not meant it as a complaint. He had meant it the way a man mentions the weather: a small, true thing, said aloud because it was on his mind. He was sitting at the kitchen table, the evening light warm on the right side of his face, and he said that it would be nice if Karen came down more than she did, that he missed her voice in the house.
Paula's response was quiet and precise in a way that told Silas more than any raised voice could have exactly how much control had shifted since June's death.
You know how these things go, Silas, Paula had said. "A family starts asking questions. A case worker gets involved. And before you know it, they've decided a blind man living alone isn't safe. And this house gets sold out from under you to pay for a facility. You don't want that. Stay quiet and let me handle things. I'm taking good care of you."