Chapter Two — Saturday, 9:30 a.m.

The building is empty on Saturdays. Gary's band played last night, and his truck is still in the lot from Friday because Pam drove them home, and that's the only car out there besides mine. The flight school is busy. Somebody's doing a preflight on the apron below my window, walking all the way around a white Cessna and touching things.

I brought coffee from the place on Taylorsville and a legal pad, which tells you something about how I expected the morning to go.

Jack lies down under the desk on my feet. I take the banker's box off the shelf. I take out the fifth shoebox and slide the rubber band off. It's gone stiff and it leaves a groove in the cardboard.

Index cards, standing on edge, the way all of hers stand. Maybe two hundred of them. No dividers. The first thing I notice is that they aren't questions.

Each card has two names on it.

Not initials, like the D. cards. Full names, first and last, one above the other. After each name there's an age, a school, and a month and year. Under the names, a few lines in her capitals about each child, and that's it. No questions. No answer scale. Nothing that looks like the instrument.

The first one I pull out:

CHARLES MATTINGLY — 10 — HARTWELL — 3/74

FRANCES DOYLE — 10 — HARTWELL — 3/74

C.: Quick to anger, quick to repair. Leads in groups. Tells on himself before anyone else can.

F.: Watches before she joins. Keeps score, quietly. Fair to a fault.

I read it three times.

I know Charles Mattingly. Everybody who does custody work in Jefferson County knows Charles Mattingly. He sat on the family bench for twenty-two years and retired the year before last. I've testified in front of him maybe thirty times. He has a temper that comes and goes in about a minute and a half, and he'll stop himself in the middle of chewing out a lawyer to say, "I'm being unfair, counselor, go ahead." Tells on himself.

His wife's name is Fran. I've met her at a bar association thing, one of those Christmas parties at the Seelbach where everybody stands around holding a drink and pretending not to look at the judges. She was standing a little apart from the circle around her husband, watching it with a pleasant expression. I remember thinking, she knows exactly who's sucking up and how much.

Fran Mattingly. Frances Doyle.

They were ten. It was 1974. My mother wrote their names on the same card.

10:40 a.m.

By 10:40 I've gone through forty cards, and the coffee's cold, and I have a theory.

It's not a hard theory. It arrives already built, the way the good ones do. My mother tested children for twenty-eight years. She saw thousands of them. And somewhere along the way, out of curiosity or mischief or that thing in her that couldn't leave a pattern alone, she started putting them together on cards. Not to do anything about it, just to see. This boy and this girl. She thinks they'd fit. She writes them down, and she puts the card in a box, and she waits to find out.

PAIRS.

It explains the card in my hand. It explains her. Ruth told me in January that my mother liked to imagine how people would fit together. It explains the two names. It explains why she'd keep it in a separate box with a rubber band around it and never mention it to anyone.

And it explains Charles and Fran Mattingly, who have been married, according to a profile in the bar journal when he retired, for forty-three years.

I don't recognize most of the other names. Children from the seventies and eighties, now fifty and sixty, scattered across a county of a million people. Some of the schools I know. A few of the surnames ring faintly, the way names in Louisville do, half the city related to the other half by marriage or bourbon. I find a woman's name I'm fairly sure belongs to a councilwoman from the South End. The boy on her card has a different surname from her husband, as far as I know, which doesn't help or hurt the theory. I put it aside.

I make a column on the legal pad: Known to be married. Under it I write Mattingly / Doyle.

I make another column: Unknown. It fills up fast.

Somewhere around card fifty I notice a little pencil mark in the bottom corner of some of them, a letter, very faint, smaller than her capitals. It's the kind of thing she did on everything: a filing code, a note to herself about which pile something went in. Half her drafts have stray marks in the margins. I don't stop for it.

The Cessna on the apron finally taxis out. Jack shifts on my feet and sighs.

I sit back in my chair with the Mattingly card in my hand and look at it for a long time. Her handwriting, square, upright, every letter the same height. Tells on himself before anyone else can. She was right about a ten-year-old. She was right about the man he'd be at sixty. And she put him next to a girl who watches before she joins, and the girl married him.

I've built theories for a living for twenty years. I know the feeling of one that fits. It's a small click, somewhere behind the breastbone, like a seatbelt.

This one clicks.

I put the cards back in the order she had them, and the rubber band around them, and the box back on the shelf. I take the legal pad home. I don't call anyone. I wouldn't know who to call. Meredith is the obvious person and the last person, and I'm aware of that, driving home down Taylorsville Road with the legal pad on the passenger seat, and I don't do anything about it.

9:20 p.m.

There's a photograph on the bookshelf in my living room that I've walked past every day for six years without looking at. My parents, on the steps of St. Agnes, June of 1968. My father in a narrow black suit with his hair cut too short, looking at the camera as if it had asked him a question he didn't know the answer to. My mother in a short white dress with a veil pushed back off her face, looking not at the camera but at him. Sideways. Up. As if she's reading him.

I take it off the shelf and sit down on the couch with it.

I think about a card. I can't help it. If she'd written one for the two of them, what would it say? I know what she'd have written about him, because I've read his whole life in her other boxes, in passing, in the margins of mine. Steady. Doesn't say what he feels. Fixes what's in front of him. He sold insurance for thirty-one years. He watched the Reds with the sound low. He taught me chess the summer I was nine and never once let me win, and when I finally beat him, at fifteen, he shook my hand across the board like I was a grown man and went out to the garage and didn't come in for an hour.

And her. What would she have written about herself? She never put herself on a card. Not once, in five boxes. I've looked.

Watches before she joins. Keeps score, quietly. That was Fran Mattingly. It could have been her, too.

I look at her face in the photograph, turned up toward him on the steps of St. Agnes, reading. I wonder if she knew, that day, exactly who she was marrying. I wonder if she'd already written it down somewhere. I wonder if that's why she married him: not because she loved him, though she did, I think, in her way, but because she'd looked at him and seen something she could predict, and found that restful.

I put the photograph back on the shelf. Then I take it down again and lay it face down on the coffee table.

Jack lifts his head from the couch he isn't allowed on and looks at me, and at the face-down photograph, and puts his head back down.

It's a theory. It clicks. That's all a click is.