Jonah, who worried in the modern way, by being efficient, sent back: You good?
She looked at the word good for a long time.
Good enough to sleep, she wrote, which was not true, and put the phone face down on the quilt.
Sleep did not come. The house made its night noises, the ones she had forgotten on purpose: the tick of the baseboard, the pear tree scraping the gutter when the wind arranged itself, a pipe knocking once as if someone had asked it a question. She heard Caleb in the kitchen, the kettle, the carefulness of a man trying not to wake a father and a sister. She heard Arthur's cough, dry, the cough of a man who had swallowed the wrong year. She lay on her back and let March return, not as a card but as a day.
He had called her at six in the morning Chicago time, five in Linden, which meant he had waited until the hour could be described as reasonable and had still missed it.
"I sat down," he had said. "I am not dying. Don't bring an ambulance into this. I sat down and I didn't like the look of the sitting."
She had heard wind in the phone, so he was outside, or the door was open. She had heard a bird. She had booked a flight while he was still explaining that his hip was a complaint and not a catastrophe. She had called Caleb twice. He had not answered. Later she would learn he had been in a gymnasium full of teenagers taking a state test, his phone in a drawer because the proctor's rules applied to him too. Later she would also learn that he had called her back at noon and she had been in the air, and that the message he left was only her name and then a silence and then, "If you're already coming, the side door sticks. Lift it."
She had lifted it. Arthur had been in the kitchen by then, embarrassed into competence, a bag of frozen peas on the hip, a pot of coffee he should not have bent to pour. He had looked smaller in the doorway than the man she kept in her mind, and she had hated the looking, the instant audit. He had seen her do it.
"Don't inventory me," he had said. "Hug me or scold me. Don't count my ribs with your eyes."