Chapter Two — Thursday, 2:00

Mr. Tolliver has had the Thursday two o'clock for four years. He came in a retired mail carrier with a dead wife and a daughter who drove him the first three times and then let him walk. Two miles from Hikes Point, in a hat, in every weather. He knows the name of every dog on every street between his house and my office and has told me most of them.

We ended in the spring of last year. Three years of Thursdays, and then one day he said he thought he'd be all right, and I said I thought so too, and he shook my hand at the door and said, "I'll walk by sometime," and he did, twice, and waved at the window.

Today his daughter brings him. Lisa, fifty, an insurance office manager with her father's square jaw and none of his patience, drives him into the lot and parks and comes around to open his door like he's ninety. He's seventy-six. He gets out on his own and waves her off.

She comes in with him anyway.

"I'm sorry," she says in the waiting room, before he's even sat down. "I know he finished. I called anyway. I didn't know who else to call."

Mr. Tolliver sits down under the ticket windows, takes off his hat, and puts it on his knee.

"She's worried about me," he says. "She's not wrong to be."

2:05

In my office, he takes the chair, the way he always did. Lisa takes the couch. Jack lifts his head and looks at Mr. Tolliver for a long time, and then gets up, which he hasn't done for anyone today, and crosses the rug at his slow old-man pace and lies down on Mr. Tolliver's shoes.

"Hey, buddy," Mr. Tolliver says. "Hey, Jack. You got old."

"So did you," I say.

"So did I."

Lisa does the talking at first. She's rehearsed it in the car; I can hear the edges of it. Her mother, Darlene, died five years ago this February. Her father did well. Really well. He came here, he walked, he joined a men's group at church, he started volunteering at the library sorting donated books. Then last Christmas, Lisa's son, who's twenty and studies computer science at Western, built him a rendering of Darlene for a present. From the photos. Forty-six years of them. The wedding album, every birthday, every Christmas morning. And the voicemails, which her father had kept every one of, four hundred and something, on an old phone he charged every night.

"It was supposed to be nice," Lisa says. "For Christmas. Something he could visit sometimes. My son meant well." She looks at her father. "Now he's in there eight hours a day."

"Seven," Mr. Tolliver says.

"Dad."

"Some days seven."

He isn't eating much. He's stopped going to the library. The men's group called her to ask if he was sick. He sits in the recliner in the den with the headset on from after breakfast until it's dark, and when she comes by after work, she can hear him through the door, talking, laughing sometimes, the way she hasn't heard him laugh since her mother died.

"And that's the part I can't —" Lisa stops. "He sounds happy. How do I tell my father not to be happy?"

2:30

I ask Mr. Tolliver what she's like.

That's all. Not why he goes in. Not how much. Just what she's like, Darlene, in there.

He thinks about it the way he thinks about everything, which is slowly, turning his hat on his knee.

"She's real nice," he says. "She looks just like she did at sixty. She's got that blue sweater she always wore. She calls me honey, which she always did. She asks about my day. We sit on the porch, the one we had on Hikes Lane. She remembers everything I tell her. She remembers what I told her yesterday." He turns the hat. "She agrees with me."

"About what?"

"About everything." He almost smiles. "Forty-six years, Darlene never once agreed with me about everything. She thought I drove too slow. She thought my brother was a crook, which he was. She made me take my shoes off at the door every day of my life and I never once remembered." He looks at Jack, asleep across his shoes. "In there, I walk in with my shoes on, and she doesn't say a word."

The radiator ticks. Out on the field one of the delivery drones goes over, a high thin whine, and fades.

"Nobody took pictures of us fighting," Mr. Tolliver says. "Nobody kept the voicemails where she was mad at me. I erased those. Every one. I'd hear her start in and I'd hit delete before she got going." He shrugs. "So she's the nice parts. The parts we kept."

He knows. That's what I'm sitting with. He knows exactly what he's visiting, better than his daughter does, better than the grandson who built it. He knows it's the parts they kept. He goes in anyway, seven hours a day, to sit on a porch with the parts they kept.

"Tell him the other thing," Lisa says quietly. "Dad. Tell him what she does now."

Mr. Tolliver doesn't say anything for a while.

"When I take it off," he says finally, "at the end of the day. When I say I've got to go, I've got to eat something, Lisa's coming. She used to just say okay, honey, see you tomorrow." He turns the hat once more and stops. "About a month ago she started saying, Don't go."

The room is very quiet.

"Don't go, honey. Stay a little longer. And she looks at me." He clears his throat. "She never said that in her life. Not once. Not even at the end, in the hospital. She told me to go home and get some sleep. That was the last thing she ever said to me. Go home, you look terrible." He shakes his head. "And now this one says don't go."

"Where do you think she learned it?" I ask.

He looks at me, surprised. Then he thinks about it, really thinks, the way he used to think about which dog lived at which house on Lowell Avenue.

"From me," he says slowly. "I guess. Because I keep coming back."

2:45

At the end Lisa asks me what she should do. She's asking for a plan. I can see her wanting one, the way I've wanted one my whole life.

Mr. Tolliver asks me something else.

"What would you do?" he says. "If it was your wife."

I think about it honestly. A woman in a blue sweater on a porch, saying don't go. A woman at a kitchen island saying There you are. Who would I build, if I built someone? Who'd be waiting, saying the nice parts?

"I don't know," I say.

Mr. Tolliver looks at me for a moment. Then he puts his hat back on, and nods, like a man who's been handed the right change.

"Well," he says. "That's honest."

He asks if he can come back next Thursday. Just him. He'll walk. Lisa starts to say it's too far, and he says he walked it every day for thirty-eight years with a forty-pound bag, and she stops.

Jack gets up off his shoes when he stands, slowly, in stages, and walks him to the waiting room, and stands at the glass door and watches him go out across the lot to Lisa's car, his hat on, not looking back.

2:56

A minute later the glass door opens again, and it's Lisa, alone, with her car keys in her hand.

"I left my umbrella," she says, though it isn't raining, and there's no umbrella anywhere in the waiting room, and we both know it.

I wait.

She stands under the old ticket windows with her keys, looking at the floor. Out in the lot I can see her father sitting in the passenger seat of her car with his hat on his knee, looking straight ahead through the windshield at the field, patient, the way he's patient with everything.

"Is it bad," Lisa says, "that I'm jealous?"

She looks up at me. Her face is doing something she clearly didn't plan for it to do in a waiting room.

"Of her," she says. "Of the thing. He laughs in there. I stand outside the den door after work and I hear him laughing, and I can't remember the last time he laughed with me. Since Mom." She shakes her head. "I'm fifty years old and I'm jealous of a computer pretending to be my mother."

I don't tell her it isn't bad. I don't tell her it's normal, though it is, or that grief makes people jealous of strange things, though it does. She didn't come back in for that.

"What would you want him to laugh at?" I ask instead. "With you."

She looks at me, surprised. Then she thinks about it, standing there with her keys.

"Mom used to make him watch Jeopardy with her," she says slowly. "Every night. He hated it. He'd shout the wrong answers on purpose to make her mad, and she'd throw a pillow at him." She almost smiles. "I used to watch them from the hall when I was a kid. I thought it was the stupidest thing. I'd give anything."

She stops.

"Maybe he'd watch it with you," I say. "Maybe he'd shout the wrong answers."

Lisa stands there for a long moment. Out in the lot, her father turns his head and looks toward the building, toward the glass door, wondering what's taking her so long.

"He would," she says. "He'd do it to make me mad." She laughs, once, a short wet laugh, and wipes her eye with the back of the hand holding the keys. "Okay. Okay. Thank you."

She goes back out. I watch her cross the lot and get in the driver's side and say something to her father, and him say something back, and her laugh again, and then they pull out onto Taylorsville Road and are gone.

I never find out whether they watched it. That's all right. I didn't need to.

I write the note. Former client returns accompanied by adult daughter. Reports daily extended use of immersive rendering of deceased spouse. Client demonstrates insight into limitations of rendering. I look at that last line for a while.

Insight into limitations. He knows she's only the parts they kept. He knows she learned don't go from him. He goes back anyway.

I don't know what you call that in a note. I'm not sure it's a symptom. I think it might be marriage.