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"So that's what you came to tell me," she says. "That the roof isn't happening."

"Yes."

"Ghorlan." She looks up. "The roof was never happening. The roof has not been happening for six years. I've got buckets. I like the buckets. When I'm dead you can sell the lot to somebody with money and they can put a metal roof on it and ruin the line of the thing." She waves a hand. "Tell me the actual thing."

"That is the actual thing."

"That's the invoice," she says. "Tell me the thing."

So I get the laptop.

It is her laptop, which is to say it is the one I bought her that she uses to argue with people about seed catalogues, and it takes a long time to do anything, and I find the episode on the network site and turn the sound down to almost nothing and turn it so we can both take it in.

Forty minutes. She does not touch her coffee.

At the doorway shot she makes a small noise through her nose.

At the woman in the fleece saying the word load she says, "Who is that," and I say I have no idea, and she says, "She's never been outside," and goes quiet again.

At the ninety seconds she sits forward and puts both hands flat on the table and stays like that until the card comes up at the end.

Then she closes the laptop.

"Well," she says. "They're good at it."

"Yes."

"That's the trouble, isn't it. They're extremely good at it." She pushes the laptop away with one finger. "Nothing in there is a lie. That's your girl's whole practice cut inside out and every frame of it happened."

"Yes."

"So." Vessik folds her hands. "Which part put you in my kitchen."

I go over it. I am tired in a way that has stopped being about food.

"The room stood up when I stood up," I say.

"What?"

"At the end of it. The lights came up and I stood up off the floor and twelve people made a small adjustment. A shoulder. A chair leg. Nothing." I turn my hands over on her table. "They have done it in every room I have entered since the year I outgrew the doorways. I have never minded it. I have made a whole life out of not minding it, out of coming in slow and going down stairs one at a time and giving people the half second, and I have always called that manners." The clock over the stove does its thing. "And a television network showed me a picture of it, and I stood up in that tent, and I could not tell anymore whether I have been doing manners for twenty-three years or whether I have been agreeing with them."

Vessik does not say anything for a while.

Then she reaches across the table and puts her hand on the back of mine, which is like a sparrow landing on a piece of equipment.

"You've been agreeing with them," she says.

"Gran."

"You have. And I have had a front row seat since you were fourteen years old and I kept my mouth shut about it because it was yours to work out." Her hand does not move. "Here's the shape of it, and then I'm going to make you eat something else. Being afraid of you is quick. Anybody can do it in the space of a breath, and it costs them nothing, and it costs you nothing either, and that's the part you like. Learning you takes about a year. It takes a year, Ghorlan, and it's inconvenient, and people have to sit still for it, and some of them won't."

"That is not..."

"You have let every soul you've met take the quick one," she says, "because if you let them be afraid of you, then you never have to find out whether they'd have sat still for the year."

The stove clock. The drip in the hall, into the bucket at the end, from a sky that stopped raining two days ago.

"That's not manners," Vessik says. "That's hiding behind your own size. And it's the only cowardly thing I have ever caught you at, and I've had eighty-four years and you've had thirty-seven and I have been waiting a long time to say it."