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they were.
    1.8 Maggie
    I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” Maggie said again at dinner. Again she burst into laughter, partly because Lyle looked so sad and funny and partly because the crushing weight of indecision had finally lifted from her soul.
    But Lyle only turned his face, still sagging with disbelief, toward Will, as if he might find the answer there. He bumped his glass up and down on the varnished tabletop and asked again, “Well, don’t you think you should? Before certain actions are taken, I mean? Actions, I mean, that can’t be taken back?”
    Maggie had seen it many times before: Lyle’s anger short-circuiting before it could gain steam and the passive voice pointing a vague finger while absolving everyone present from responsibility, because the minute he started to criticize someone else, he would be reminded of his own shortcomings, which invariably caused him to think, Who am I to say! Sometimes he said it out loud: “Who am I to say!” On those occasions Maggie would stroke his hair and croon, “You have as much right as anyone, honeybun.” Humility was one of the things she had always loved about her husband, but now all she felt was irritation. “If your car was headed at a crowded sidewalk, you wouldn’t work out all the details before you turned the wheel!” she exclaimed.
    But Lyle said thoughtfully that yes, he would. “There’d be no sense turning it toward a more crowded sidewalk, now, would there?”
    He laid his heavy hands on the table and examined his fingernails, which were dirty and chipped. Maggie had never before noticed how blocky his hands were, how his fingers were all nearly the same length, as if they had been cut from the same chunk of wood as the table and never properly shaped. “If I was headed toward the sidewalk outside the Multiplex on a Saturday, I’d turn the wheel toward the Merry Maid, but if I was on Main Street during the homecoming parade…”
    “You wouldn’t aim it at a more crowded sidewalk!” said Maggie impatiently. “You’d aim it at a less crowded one!”
    “Exactly which sidewalk are we talking about?”
    Lyle was like one of the heavy hand trucks they used to move ordnance at the plant—slow moving and hard to turn. Maggie could tell from his expression that he was trying to come up with some way to justify doing nothing, some way to put himself in the passenger seat and so be absolved of having to steer. She tried to catch Will’s eye the way Will always caught hers when the subject of the conversation was Will. The boy was poking at his uneaten vegetables when, suddenly, he came out with a justification of his own. “It’s the lesser of two evils,” he said slowly, looking up from under his pale eyebrows at his dad.
    Maggie swelled with pride in her first and only born. How many times had she stuck up for Will to Lyle or the teachers at the school? And now, just when she needed him, Will was sticking up for her. “You see!” she crowed. “Will knows what I’m talking about!”
    But Will surprised her again by saying, “I’m not talking about the crowded sidewalk. I’m talking about the munitions plant. I’m talking about guns and even about killing people. That’s the thing that’s the lesser of two evils. Do you really want us to wait for the terrorists to use their weapons on us?”
    “Lesser evils—” began Maggie, but for the first time in many years, the proper words came to Lyle before they came to her.
    “I think your mother just wants to do something she can believe in,” he said.
    But that wasn’t quite it either—there was more to it than that.
    After the dishes were washed and put away, Maggie took one of the Internet articles out of the dresser drawer where she kept a brown accordion file of what she had begun to think of as her evidence and showed it to Will and Lyle. “I wanted you to see this,” she said, spreading the printouts on the table, and to Will she added, “I think you’re old