Jailed, trusted, and shown the grey room

One of Salinas's periodic anti-gambling raids scoops Cal up at a fan-tan game, and Adam collects him from the jail. Over a long silence at the breakfast table Adam does not punish him but says, "I've failed you, haven't I?" — his own father made a mould and forced him into it. They talk properly for the first time: Cal admits he does bad things and hurts his brother, offers to run the ranch to pay Aron's way through college, and lets slip that he knows about their mother. Adam says, "I trust you, son." Made new by it, Cal trails Kate for eight Mondays through the bank vault, the beauty parlour and the candy store, until she catches him at her gate and takes him into a windowless grey room. She unwraps a bandaged arthritic finger, boasts of how she fooled everyone and why she shot Adam, and calls him her own kind. He asks whether she ever felt she was missing something, and she shuts. He leaves happy: if he is mean it is his own mean, and she is afraid.

Two interviews with two parents, built so the second is only survivable because of the first. Adam's confession of failure gives Cal something to carry into the grey room, and Kate loses the moment she claims him as her kind, because that is the claim he has just decided he can refuse. The hooded lamp and the walls that suck up light argue about who is cornered.