That’s what I’d have told her to do.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“And then?”

“Then nothing,” Caleb said. “He talked about a carburetor for twenty minutes. That’s what a man does.”

Before I left he asked me if the boys were all right, and I told him about the marina and the community college, and he nodded slowly and said, “Good.

Good,” and then he cried a little, without embarrassment, the way people do at the end.