He was quiet a long time. Both women sat watching him. He reached up and stroked his nose with his thumb and bent back forefinger. He felt teary and would not cry and a part of him felt he was too close to tears too much of the time these days for it to be good for him. He wanted again nothing more than to be sitting in the house outside Bethlehem with his father, the two of them arguing in the amused not very serious way they always had over anything at all. He looked at the tall old beautiful-woman version of his father before him and said, “Pop was not broke. Besides the place over there he left to me, there was a pile of money. I’ve got money enough.” And because he did not want them to doubt him, he said, “It’s all rolled up in bundles in a shoebox outside right now. In the back end of the car.”

“Don’t you touch that money!” Abby’s hands working together before her, over and around themselves. “Put it in a bank! Then, four-five years from now, you finish school, know what you want from yourself, you’ll have something to start off with.” She stopped and took her bottom lip between her teeth a moment and said, “Maybe then, that money’ll do you some good. You’ll see.”

Foster felt his body swaying. He was hot by the stove but could not move. He looked down at the floor where the carpet ended and met the floorboards that ran under his feet. As if he could find purpose or reassurance there in the gap between what was covered and what lay under. Feeling the eyes behind his head blank out of the portrait. Wishing they would speak to him, those dead souls. But there was nothing but the blood booming in his own temples. Still looking down he said, “I can’t.”

There was no pause. “Can’t what?”

So he looked up at them because he had to. His voice came from him broken and sad and soft. “I won’t stay here. Not to finish school or go on to college. I guess someway I pretty much hate to tell you this but it’s not what I need to do right now.”

Prudence did not move but Abigail did. She sat back in her seat and crossed one leg up over the other, fluted fingers even as she moved plucking the fabric up and releasing it so the skirt of her dress settled over her crossed legs, all smooth. She rested her head against the back of her chair. “So just what,” she asked, “do you propose to do?”

“Well, ma’am”—and he looked from one to the other before continuing—“I’m going to North Carolina. To Sweetboro. To see what I can learn.”

Abby did not move. But Prudence leaned forward, her hands taking a hard hold of her knees. She cried out to him, “Oh, no. Why would you do that? Foster? Whatever for?”