The Last Detour: The Idle Hour

The first thing Marisol noticed was the silence.

It pressed against her eardrums with a weight she had not felt since childhood, since those summer visits to her grandmother's house in the high desert where the wind had nothing to carry and the dust settled into the cracks of window frames and stayed. She lay still beneath a cotton blanket, her right hand curled against the pillow, and waited for the diesel rattle that had lulled her to sleep the night before. The tractor's idle was a familiar companion, a low mechanical purr that vibrated through the floorboards of the old farmhouse and into her bones, a sound so constant she had stopped hearing it the way a fisherman stops hearing the sea.

Now, with the engine off, the absence was louder than the noise had ever been.

Marisol opened her eyes. Pale morning light filtered through the muslin curtains her mother had sewn decades ago, casting faint geometric patterns across the exposed beams of the ceiling. A moth had settled on the windowsill, its wings folded into the shape of a small, patient prayer. Beyond the glass, the yard lay quiet under a sky the color of old bone. The chickens had not yet begun their morning chorus. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath.

She sat up slowly, the wooden frame of the bed creaking beneath her, and swung her legs over the edge. Her feet touched the braided rug her father had made during the last winter of his life, and she pressed her toes into its roughness. The floorboards were cold. She reached for the wool sweater draped over the chair beside her and pulled it over her shoulders, drawing the sleeves down over her hands the way she had as a girl.

Then she held her hands out in front of her and looked at them.

Her right hand still held the shape of the steering wheel. Her fingers retained the memory of vibration, a phantom hum that ran from her palm up through the tendons of her forearm. She flexed them once, twice, three times. The sensation lingered, stubborn and strange, as though the tractor's engine were still turning somewhere deep in her muscle memory. She had driven the old International Harvester across the back pasture for nearly four hours the previous afternoon, opening a new irrigation line along the fence row, and her grip had finally loosened only when she had killed the ignition and let the key drop warm into her palm.

The key was on the nightstand now, beside the small clay bowl where she kept hairpins and loose coins. She picked it up and turned it over. The metal was cool against her fingers, its teeth worn smooth from years of use.

Marisol set the key down and rose.

The kitchen smelled faintly of last night's coffee and the cedar drawer liners her father had installed in every cabinet of the house. She lit the burner under the kettle, then moved to the window above the sink. The view stretched across the side yard, past the woodpile her brother had stacked in autumn, to the pasture where the tractor sat waiting. In the gray light, the International looked patient, its green paint dulled with dust and use, its front tires mired slightly in the soft earth where she had left it.

She watched it for a long moment.

The kettle began to tick. She turned away from the window, found the ceramic canister of ground coffee her sister had sent from the city, and measured out two spoonfuls into the enamel pot. The coffee was a habit she kept without enthusiasm, a small ritual inherited from her father, who had believed that morning required a bitter counterweight to whatever sweetness the day might carry.

While the water heated, she crossed the hall to the front room. The answering machine sat on the small desk beneath the framed photograph of her grandfather, a black plastic box that had not blinked its red light since Tuesday. She pressed the playback button anyway, standing with her arms folded, listening to the faint hiss of an empty tape. No messages. No callers.

She thought of Lila Pruitt.

The journalist had stopped by the farm three days earlier, arriving in a silver hatchback that did not belong on the dirt road leading to the Vega property. Lila had climbed out with a notebook in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, her expression caught somewhere between determination and resignation. She had asked about the water rights. She had asked about the bypass permit. She had asked, with the casual precision of a professional, whether Marisol had noticed any irregularities in the county's recent correspondence.

Marisol had answered what she could and deflected what she could not. She had offered coffee. Lila had accepted, and they had sat at the kitchen table for nearly two hours, the journalist's questions giving way, slowly, to something that resembled conversation. Lila spoke of her return to the valley with a dryness that bordered on bitterness, and Marisol had listened without interruption, recognizing in the other woman's careful phrasing the particular exhaustion of someone who had left a place and been pulled back to it.

When Lila had finally stood to leave, she had paused at the door and said, quietly, that the county clerk's office had been unusually quiet about certain files. Marisol had nodded. She had known Dale Pruitt since grade school, had watched him marry into the family name that now carried some local weight, had seen him navigate small rooms with the practiced ease of a man who never wanted to be the source of trouble.

She had not asked Lila to elaborate. She had not needed to.

The kettle whistled. Marisol returned to the kitchen, poured the water over the grounds, and set the pot on the back of the stove to steep. The smell of coffee filled the small room, mingling with the cedar and the faint mineral tang of the well water that ran through the old pipes. She took two cups from the shelf, paused, then returned one to its place.

There was no one to share the morning with.

She carried her cup to the porch and sat in the wooden chair that had been her father's favorite, its slats worn smooth by decades of use. The boards beneath her feet held the chill of the night, and she tucked her legs beneath her, drawing the sweater tighter. Across the yard, the chickens had begun to stir. A rooster announced itself, once, twice, and fell silent. A barn cat emerged from beneath the woodpile, stretched, and vanished into the tall grass at the edge of the pasture.

The farm lay around her in the early light, patient and familiar.

The house had been built by her grandfather in the spring of 1947, on a parcel of land that had been in the Vega family for three generations. The foundation was stone hauled from the dry creek bed to the north. The walls were lathe and plaster, patched over the years with whatever materials had been available. The roof had been replaced twice, most recently by her father in the summer before he died, and the new shingles still held their color against the weather.

Her father had kept the books in a green metal cabinet in the mudroom, and after the funeral Marisol had sat on the floor beside it and read through every ledger he had left. She had learned the rhythm of his seasons in the careful columns of his handwriting, the dates of planting and harvest, the entries for seed and fuel and labor, the small notations he had made beside certain figures that indicated, without explanation, which expenses were hers to inherit and which were debts he had quietly absorbed.

She had closed the cabinet and sat for a long time in the silence of the mudroom, listening to the clock above the door tick through the seconds.

Now she sat on the porch and listened to the same clock, its muffled rhythm reaching her through the open window.

The coffee was strong. She drank it without pleasure, the way her father had taught her, treating the bitterness as a kind of medicine. Across the pasture, the tractor waited. She would need to finish the irrigation line before the water board sent its inspector, a man named Wendell Oakes who had a reputation for thoroughness and a particular fondness for finding fault. She had met Wendell once, at a county meeting two winters ago, and had found him courteous and difficult to read. He had shaken her hand with a firmness that suggested habit rather than warmth, and he had asked questions about her property boundaries that she had answered with the same measured patience she now applied to her coffee.

She finished the cup and set it on the porch rail.

The phantom vibration in her hands had not subsided. She rubbed her palms together slowly, feeling the roughness of calluses against calluses, the small scars across her knuckles from a barbed wire repair she had done in her first year of running the farm alone. The sensation was not painful. It was simply present, a low hum at the edge of perception, as though the tractor's engine were still turning somewhere in the house's bones.

She had not expected this. She had driven machines since she was eleven years old, had learned the clutch of her father's old pickup and the gears of the combine and the delicate throttle of the riding mower, and she had never carried their vibration with her after the engine stopped. Perhaps it was the hours. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar feeling of having nothing immediate to do. The irrigation line was laid. The chickens would need feeding within the hour. The day stretched ahead of her with the blank patience of a page waiting for ink.

Marisol stood, crossed the porch, and walked down the steps into the yard.

The grass was wet. She felt it soak through the canvas of her work boots, the cold rising through the soles and settling into her arches. She walked toward the tractor with her hands at her sides, the sweater sleeves hanging past her wrists, and stopped a few feet from the front tire. The metal of the wheel was cold. She placed her palm against it and held it there, feeling the texture of the rubber, the grit of dried mud, the slow transfer of morning chill into her skin.

The vibration was gone. The phantom hum had faded somewhere between the porch and the pasture, replaced by the ordinary sensations of a body moving through cold air. She flexed her hand once, then stepped back.

The rooster called again. The barn cat reappeared at the corner of the woodpile, sat, and began to wash its face with the methodical attention of a creature that had nowhere particular to be. The chickens emerged from the coop in a slow procession, their feathers ruffled against the chill, their steps deliberate and unhurried.

Marisol watched them scatter across the yard, then turned back toward the house. She would need to check the irrigation valve before the inspector arrived. She would need to confirm the appointment Lila had mentioned, the one scheduled for the following Tuesday, when someone from the county would come to verify the new line's placement against the recorded boundaries. She would need to call her sister in the city, who had been asking after the property tax with a frequency that suggested either genuine concern or the quiet anxiety of a woman who had left the valley and could not quite let go of it.

She climbed the porch steps and reached for the door handle.

The handle was brass, polished by her father's hands until it shone, and it turned under her grip with the smooth resistance of well-maintained hardware. She paused there, her hand on the metal, and looked back across the yard toward the pasture.

The tractor sat in the gray light, patient and still. The steam of her breath rose and vanished. Somewhere beyond the far fence row, a truck engine turned over, coughed, and settled into a low rumble that drifted across the property and faded.

Marisol opened the door and stepped inside.

The kitchen held the memory of coffee even hours after the pot had been emptied and rinsed. Esmeralda could not smell it anymore, but she knew it had been there, knew the machine had cycled through its routine sometime around five, knew her grandmother had likely been the one to start it because the burner was left on the warm setting rather than the off, a small habit her grandmother had carried since before the current stove had been installed.

Esmeralda filled the kettle instead. The water ran from the tap in a thin stream, the pressure uneven this early, and she set the kettle on the stove and turned the burner to medium. While it heated, she pulled a mug from the cabinet, the one with the chipped rim and the faded logo from a feed store that had closed three owners ago.

She stood at the counter and looked out the window above the sink. The yard was visible from here in a way that felt almost diagrammatic, the woodpile, the path to the barn, the gate to the pasture all arranged in their familiar geometry. From this angle she could see the far corner of the back field where the soil had been turned two weeks earlier, dark against the pale stubble, waiting for whatever the season would bring.

The kettle clicked. She poured the water over the tea bag she had set in the mug and watched the color leach from green to amber. Steam curled up and vanished against the cold glass.

She thought about the inspector. She thought about the appointment, the one Lila had mentioned, the Tuesday visit. She thought about the conversation she would need to have with her grandmother, the one where she explained that someone from the county would be walking the property, checking that the new irrigation line matched what had been recorded, confirming that the placement was correct, that the easement had been respected, that nothing had been altered in a way that would require remediation.

The conversation would be harder than the inspection itself.

Esmeralda drank the tea too fast and burned the roof of her mouth, and the small pain grounded her in the present in a way that the thinking had not. She set the mug down, flexed her jaw once, and went to find her boots.

---

The farm was not a large operation, but it was not a small one either, and the morning routine had a rhythm that had been set long before Esmeralda had been born. The animals needed feeding. The egg collection needed doing. The irrigation system needed to be walked, valve by valve, to confirm that the cycles had run and that the moisture in the soil was where it was supposed to be.

Esmeralda took the east path first, the one that curved past the barn and then out along the fence row toward the lower field. The grass was wet underfoot, the dew heavy enough that her boots left dark prints on the pale blades. The cat was there again, or perhaps a different cat, sitting on the fence post with its tail wrapped neatly around its haunches, watching her pass with the unblinking attention of a creature that had no other commitments.

The chickens were out in force now, a small army of brown and white feathers moving in a loose formation across the side yard, their sounds a constant low commentary that rose and fell without pattern. Esmeralda checked the coop, counted the eggs in the nesting boxes, and carried them back to the house in the wire basket that hung from her arm.

Inside, she set the eggs on the counter and listened to the silence of the kitchen for a moment. The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. The house settled around her with the small sounds of a structure that had been standing for longer than she had been alive.

She went back out.

---

The irrigation manifold was mounted on a post at the edge of the lower field, a collection of valves and gauges that her grandfather had installed in the late seventies and that her father had upgraded twice. Esmeralda knew it the way she knew the rest of the farm, not because she had studied it but because she had grown up beside it, had watched it being maintained, had helped with the repairs when repairs were needed.

The cover was off when she arrived. The valves were set to their overnight positions, the timers cycled, the gauges showing the pressures that indicated normal function. She checked each one in turn, hand on the metal, feeling for the subtle vibration that meant water was moving somewhere in the line.

The section that had been repaired last spring ran along the south edge, the pipe laid in a shallow trench that had been filled and seeded and that now showed only as a faint line of slightly different grass. The repair had held through the summer and into the fall, and Esmeralda allowed herself a small satisfaction at the sight of it, the way the soil had settled, the way the grass had come back.

She moved on to the next valve. Then the next.

---

The problem was not immediately obvious.

Esmeralda had walked the manifold and checked the readings and confirmed that the timers were set, and she had begun the loop back toward the house, taking the path that curved through the kitchen garden, the one that her grandmother had planted and tended for as long as anyone could remember. The garden was quiet in the early light, the rows of fall crops showing the last of their color, the soil dark and damp from the overnight cycle.

She stopped at the edge of the third row.

The water was not where it should have been. The drip line that ran along the base of the plants was intact, but the moisture pattern in the soil was wrong, the dark area wider than it should have been, the saturation extending beyond the row and into the path between this section and the next.

Esmeralda knelt and pressed her fingers into the soil. It was soft, softer than it should have been, the water content well beyond what the timer would have allowed. She followed the line of dampness with her hand, feeling for the source, and found it at the base of the riser that fed this particular section.

The connector had come loose.

Not completely, not enough to make the failure obvious from the manifold, but enough that the pressure was escaping at the joint, enough that the water was pooling in the wrong place, enough that the seedlings in the adjacent row were sitting in a saturation they had not been designed to handle.

Esmeralda sat back on her heels and looked at the small flood.

The riser was a simple thing, a PVC joint that had been pressed into place and that should have held, that had held through the previous cycles, that would have continued to hold if the ground had not shifted slightly with the season or if the seal had not begun to age. It was not a catastrophe. It was a maintenance issue, the kind of thing that happened on a farm, the kind of thing that required a wrench and a few minutes and the willingness to get one's hands wet.

She went to the barn for the tool.

---

The fix took longer than it should have. The connector was older than she had expected, the plastic slightly brittle, and she had to work carefully to avoid cracking the fitting further. The soil around the base was saturated, and the water continued to seep as she worked, and by the time she had the joint reseated and the pressure restored, the small flood had spread.

The seedlings in the next row were not dead. They were drooping, their leaves heavy with the excess moisture, their roots sitting in soil that was closer to mud than to the well-drained mix they had been started in. Some of them would recover. Some of them would not. The row would need to be replanted, at least in part, and the cost of the seed was not nothing, and the time lost was not nothing, and the fact that it had happened at all sat in her chest like a stone she could not quite cough up.

Esmeralda stood in the garden with the wrench in her hand and the water pooling around her boots and looked at the damage she had not caused but that she had failed to prevent.

The wrench was cold in her palm. The morning had not warmed. The cat had followed her back and was sitting on the garden fence, watching her with the same unblinking attention it gave to everything.

The sound of the screen door opening came from the direction of the house, and Esmeralda looked up to see her grandmother standing on the porch, one hand on the rail, the other shading her eyes against the pale light.

The distance between them was too far for conversation, but the question in the posture was clear enough.

Esmeralda lifted the wrench slightly, a gesture that said she was handling it, and her grandmother nodded once and went back inside.

The water continued to pool. The seedlings continued to droop. The morning continued its slow unfolding, indifferent to the small failure that had occurred in the kitchen garden of a farm that had been in the family for three generations.

Esmeralda began the work of cleanup.

The cleanup took longer than it should have. There were fittings to reassemble, soil to redistribute, roots to assess one by one in the hopes that she was being too pessimistic about their chances. Esmeralda worked without hurrying, because hurrying made mistakes, and she had already absorbed enough mistakes for the day.

By early afternoon the row was replanted where it needed to be, the tools were back in the she'd, and the cat had lost interest in her entirely and was sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the porch.

Esmeralda stood in the yard and looked at the truck and thought about Mendocino.

The thought arrived without preamble, the way the best and worst thoughts often did. It was an impulse, and she had been raised to distrust impulses, but it was also a small enough thing. A drive to the village. A walk on the headlands. An hour or two that belonged to her rather than to the farm or to her grandmother or to the slow, patient work of rebuilding what had been broken.

Her grandmother was asleep in the chair by the window, or nearly asleep, the book open on her lap, the reading glasses sliding down her nose. The house would not fall down if she left it. The seedlings would not either die or recover in the next two hours. The afternoon stretched ahead of her, empty and indifferent, and the truck had gas in it, and the road to Mendocino was a road she knew.

She did not make a decision so much as she made an absence of refusal.

The keys were on the hook by the door. She took them. The screen door closed behind her with the sound it always made.

---

The drive took forty minutes on the winding coastal road, past the stands of second-growth redwood and the small farms that clung to the clearings, past the place where a landslide had taken out a quarter mile of shoulder two winters ago and the county had still not entirely finished the repairs. She knew the road. She had been driving it since she was fifteen, when her father had started letting her take the old pickup to town for parts, and the familiarity of it was a kind of comfort that did not require her to think.

The radio was off. She did not turn it on.

Mendocino announced itself in stages. First the reduction in tree cover, the road opening out into the headland pastures that overlooked the ocean. Then the first of the houses, set back from the road behind fences and hedges, painted in colors that would have looked out of place inland. Then the village itself, compressed onto its rocky shelf above the water, the buildings low and wooden and older than they had any right to be, the whole of it looking like something a person with more imagination than sense had decided to preserve against the modern world.

She parked on Lansing Street, where she had always parked, in the gravel lot behind the bookstore. The bookstore was closed for the season. Everything on the coast was closed for the season, or reduced to weekend hours, or operating on the assumption that the people who lived here year-round did not actually need anything from the businesses that existed primarily to serve the people who did not.

She locked the truck and walked.

The café she went to was on the corner of Lansing and Main, in a building that had been a café for as long as she could remember and had been something else before that, something she had never bothered to learn. The name of it had changed twice in the last ten years. The current name was in a font she could not read from across the street and she did not cross the street to read it more closely.

Inside, the place was nearly full.

This surprised her, and then it did not. It was a weekday in the off-season, but the off-season was no longer as empty as it had been when she was a child. There were people in the village now who had not been born here, who had come for the views or the quiet or the particular kind of remoteness that had become fashionable in the way that all remoteness eventually became fashionable. They were here in the middle of a Tuesday in November, taking up tables, ordering drinks she had never heard of, photographing their plates before they ate them.

The counter was at the back. The menu was chalked on a board above it in handwriting that looped and curlicued. She stood in front of it and read it.

The words on the board did not form a coherent sentence in her head. She read each of them individually. Latte. Cortado. Drip. Cold brew. Chai. Matcha. Oat milk. Almond milk. Whole milk. A note about the dairy being local. A note about the espresso being single-origin. A note about the pastries being baked in-house.

She had eaten breakfast at seven. She had eaten lunch at noon, or would have eaten lunch at noon if there had been lunch to eat, and there had been no lunch because she had been elbow-deep in broken pipe and drowned seedlings. The next time she would normally eat was six, when her grandmother expected her at the table, when the meal was laid out, when the rhythm of the day reasserted itself in the form of the chair she sat in and the plate she was given.

It was two thirty in the afternoon. The next meal was three and a half hours away. She was not hungry. She was not anything in particular, except aware that the menu in front of her did not contain the word she needed.

The woman behind the counter was waiting. She had a small device in her hand and a smile on her face that was patient and professional and did not contain any particular warmth.

"Can I help you?" the woman said.

Esmeralda looked at the board again. She looked at the woman. She looked at the board a third time, because it seemed like the thing to do.

"Do you have coffee," she said.

It came out as a question, which she had not intended, because of course they had coffee. It was a café. The board had said drip.

"Sure," the woman said. "Drip or pour-over?"

The question implied a distinction she had not been aware of, and the awareness of not being aware of it settled in her stomach like a small, cold weight.

"Drip," she said.

"Regular or decaf?"

"Regular."

"Room for cream?"

"Yes."

The woman repeated the order back to her in a string of words that sounded rehearsed, and Esmeralda nodded because nodding was the thing she could do, and then she stepped to the side to wait, and the wait was longer than she expected, because the drink was not just coffee, it appeared, it was a process.

She found a table by the window that was smaller than she would have liked but was the only one available. She sat in the chair with her back to the wall, which was a habit she had from restaurants her father used to take her to when she was small, a habit that had never served any particular purpose but that she had never lost.

The view through the window was of the street, and of a portion of the headlands beyond it, and of the ocean in the distance, gray and flat under the overcast. A couple at the next table was speaking a language she did not recognize, softly, the way people speak when they are aware they are in public. The man had a camera around his neck. The woman had a guidebook open on the table between them, and she was tracing a route with her finger.

Esmeralda looked at her hands. They were still dirty under the nails, despite the wash she had given them at the kitchen sink before she left. There was a line of grease across the back of her left hand that she had not noticed until now.

The coffee arrived. It was in a cup that was smaller than the cups she had at home, and it had a design on the side of it that might have been a logo or might have been art, and there was a small metal pitcher beside it that contained the cream.

She poured the cream. She lifted the cup. She drank.

The coffee was not bad. It was also not the coffee she drank at home, which her grandmother made in a percolator that had been in the kitchen since before Esmeralda was born, and which tasted of the particular brand of grounds they had always bought, and which she associated with the seven o'clock hour and the quiet of the morning and her father sitting across from her with the sports section of the paper.

She set the cup down and looked at the window again.

The afternoon was going to continue whether she participated in it or not. The coffee was going to get cold. The couple at the next table was going to finish their guidebook and go somewhere else. The woman behind the counter was going to serve more drinks to more people who knew the difference between drip and pour-over and who were not going to stand in front of the board for four minutes trying to remember what they had come in for.

Esmeralda did not know what she had come in for.

She had driven to Mendocino on an impulse, and the impulse had not survived contact with the menu. She was sitting in a café that was not her kitchen, drinking coffee that was not her grandmother's, in a village she had known all her life but that she was visiting now as if she were a visitor, and the distance between those two versions of herself, the one who belonged here and the one who did not, was the exact distance of the forty-minute drive she had taken to get from one to the other.

The thought arrived fully formed, the way the worst thoughts always arrived. Her father had eaten lunch at noon. Her father had eaten dinner at six. Her father had eaten breakfast at seven. The meals had been the frame on which the day was stretched, and the frame had held, and the day had been bearable because of it, and now the frame was gone and the day was not a day, it was just an expanse of hours, and the hours did not know what to do with themselves.

She was not hungry. She was not tired. She was not grieving, exactly, although the grief was in the room with her, sitting in the empty chair across the table, not saying anything, not requiring anything, just present.

Esmeralda picked up the cup again. She drank the rest of the coffee. She set the cup down in the ring of moisture it had left on the table.

The man at the next table glanced at her, briefly, and then away. The woman closed the guidebook and put it in her bag. They stood up. They left.

The table they had been at was empty now, and the chair was empty, and the window behind it showed the street and the headlands and the gray ocean.

Esmeralda put her hand flat on the table, on the side where the cup had been, where the ring of moisture was still slightly cool. She left it there for a moment. Then she took it away.

She left money on the table, more than the coffee had cost, because she did not have the exact change and did not want to wait at the counter for it. She pushed her chair in. She walked to the door.

Outside, the wind off the ocean was stronger than it had been when she came in. It came up the street from the direction of the headlands, carrying the salt smell of the water and the colder air that lived above it. She zipped her jacket to the top.

The truck was where she had left it. She got in. She did not start it yet.

She sat in the driver's seat with her hands on the wheel and looked out through the windshield at the village she had grown up ten miles from, the village she had been to a hundred times, the village that was full of people she did not know drinking coffee she did not order from menus she could not read.

The afternoon was not over. The day was not over. There would be the drive home, and the kitchen, and her grandmother, and the six o'clock meal that was still three and a half hours away, and the seedlings that were either recovering or not, and the work of the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

She started the truck.

She drove home the way she had come, past the clearings and the second-growth redwood and the slide that had not been entirely fixed, and the road did not ask her anything, and she did not have anything to say to it.

When she pulled into the yard, the cat was sitting on the porch rail in the same patch of sun it had been sitting in when she left. The house looked the same. The garden looked the same, or mostly the same, the replanted row a little raw against the established ones.

She sat in the truck for a moment with the engine off and the keys still in it and looked at the house.

Then she got out. She locked the truck. She went inside.

Her grandmother was awake, sitting in the chair by the window, the book closed on her lap now, the glasses folded in her hand.

She looked up when the door opened. She did not ask where Esmeralda had been.

Esmeralda set the keys on the hook. She went to the sink. She washed her hands, carefully, getting the grease out from under the nails, drying them on the towel that hung from the oven handle.

She sat down across from her grandmother.

The afternoon light came through the window and lay on the floor between them in a long, pale stripe.

Neither of them spoke for a while, and the silence was the kind of silence that did not require filling.