Chapter 7: Four Seconds

Her father was halfway up Ford Street with a spirit level in one hand and half the parish's problems in the other, and he saw her before she saw him, because he had spent nine days watching every road into town. The first she knew of home was his voice going up the street like a flag: "THERE she is." There followed a passage of time for which Genna kept no notes. When the world resumed its ordinary offices, she was being held at arm's length in the middle of Ford Street and inspected, the full traverse: face, hands, boots, the torn pack, the oilcloth, the wire marks the sunglasses had left at her temples. She watched him read all of it in order. She watched the ledger behind his eyes take delivery of nine days in four seconds. Then she watched him decide, visibly, deliberately, the way he decided everything, not to ask any of it here in the street. "You'll give me the whole line tonight," he said. "Every station of it. I'll want the field notes too, mind, not just the tavern version." Then, because he was Gennaph, and because his voice had a crack in it that the whole street could hear and he did not care: "Hello, Genna." "Hello, Da." "You're thin." He turned his head and shouted toward the Dry Toast. "Tobin! She's thin!" Bread was already being cut. Some things stand, whatever the ground does. She tried to give him back the ring on the walk up the street. She worked it half off her finger, and he closed her hand over it without breaking stride or argument, the whole discussion conducted and lost in one gesture. Then, mercifully, he talked shop. The town's damage, wall by wall, in strict order of hazard.…