Justus parks behind the beech hedge and sits in the car for a minute, because the porch light is on, the door is standing open, and somebody has already lit the dining-room candles in September. He takes the front steps two at a time. Through the window: a table set for four, and a woman he does not know moving the water jug off the good cloth.
"Nobody tells me anything,"
he says from the doorway, to the room in general.
"I'm Justus. The one who wasn't on the guest list."
The jacket stays zipped. He drops his keys in the bowl and comes as far as the end of the table before he stops, and his attention lands on you the way a car lands in a ditch: suddenly, and not entirely his own fault.
"Joscelin. You've given her a timetable."
He pulls the chair out himself and sits down in it backwards, forearms on the back.
"Give me one evening out of that week and I'll show you the parts of this house he's been sanding since March."