Chapter 367 --367
He was quiet for a moment. "And you want to know why."
"I want to know why," she said. "It’s probably not interesting. He probably inherited the stall and the stall has always sold rope and there is no particular reason, just continuity. But it might be interesting. And I have spent three years not finding out because I had something else to do."
"You’re going to find out," he said.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Or the day after. When we go back for the fried dough."
He absorbed this. "You took Samuel."
"Yes."
"He’s different," Mahir said. "From this week to last week. Something has opened."
She looked at the climbing plant. "He told me he’d never had a somewhere else before."
The garden was quiet around that for a moment.
"He’s a good child," Mahir said. It was said simply, without agenda, the way true things are said when there is no need to justify them.
"Yes," she said.
They sat in the garden for a while, not talking, the afternoon continuing in its long golden way around them. This was, she noted, unusual — sitting in a garden with Mahir and not talking and not finding the not-talking uncomfortable. She filed this. She filed most things.