At Table Nineteen, the evening had completed itself. Ruth Abernathy had danced — once, briefly, with the widowed cousin, both of them laughing at the altitude of it — and had declared herself satisfied down to the ground. Dale Okafor had spoken a little more, and then, with the discretion that had governed him all night, a little less, because there is a point past which a man at a borrowed table understands that the kindness he has been shown is not an invitation to spend it. He shook Isaiah's hand when the Colemans rose to go, and held it a moment longer than protocol allows, and said only, "Safe home, sir," in a voice that meant several other things and trusted Isaiah to file them correctly.
"You take care of that drawer," Naomi told him, "and the man who keeps his envelope in it."
"I will, ma'am," Dale said. "That's — I will."
The Colemans did not make a departure of it. They gathered Naomi's wrap from the cloakroom, where the attendant, a woman of Ruth's generation and something of her manner, pressed the ruined jacket into a dry cleaner's bag with the solemnity of a nurse handling evidence and said, "Shame about the wine, sir. Fine jacket." Isaiah thanked her by name — her name was on a small brass plate, and he had read it, which no one else that evening had done — and they walked the length of the ballroom's edge, past the dancers, past the far tables emptying of their minor guests, toward the great doors and the October night beyond them.
Reginald Pemberton was at the doors. He stationed himself there in the last hour of every ball, as his father had, dispensing farewells like a man handing out coins from a fortune he had not personally earned. He saw the Colemans coming and his face arranged itself into the broad, genial welcome he reserved for departures he approved of, and he took Isaiah's hand in both of his own.
"Coleman," he said heartily. "Glad you could come. We must do this again — get you up to the house properly next time. And that business with the wine —" he waved it away, a king dismissing a weather event — "no harm done, none at all, hope the jacket survives."
"Thank you for a memorable evening," Isaiah said. He said it courteously, and completely, and he held the older man's gaze with the calm of a man signing a document he has already read to the last page. "I hope the coming year treats your family as kindly as this house treats its guests."
Reginald Pemberton beamed. It was, to him, a gracious sentence, handsomely turned, from a guest who knew how gratitude was done — and he received it exactly as he received everything: as confirmation. "Kind of you to say so," he said. "Kind of you. That's the Pemberton way, you know. Always has been." He turned, still smiling, genial and uncomprehending, to greet the next departure.
The night outside was cold and very clear, and the gravel was loud under their shoes, and the valets were bringing the cars around in a long, patient line of headlights. Naomi stood a moment on the steps, looking back at the house — every window lit, the music reduced by distance to a rumor of itself — and she slipped her arm through her husband's, on the side away from the wine.
"Well," she said. "Ninety years of excellence."
"Ninety years," Isaiah said, "and a young man in Stratford who does arithmetic they can't pronounce at the head table." He looked at the house a moment longer. The expression was mild. It was almost tender. It was the expression of a man reading the last page of a book he owns.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go home."
The papers were on the kitchen table, where Naomi had put them, which was her way of saying they were in the room and would stay in the room until he dealt with them. A fountain pen lay across the top folder like a thing asleep. Outside the tall windows, Sunday was doing what Sunday did in their neighborhood in Atlanta — lawn sprinklers ticking, the heat coming up off the pavement with the smell of cut grass and somebody's grill. The house was quiet in the particular way of a house whose occupants have agreed, without discussing it, to let one subject rest until evening.