The trunk lid shuddered and would not stay up. Derek braced it with two fingers while Lauren slid the pink hard-shell in against the blue one, and the dark car ticked as it cooled, and the curb smelled of wet concrete and somebody else’s coffee. Daylight had no color in it. The cloud cover sat low over the terminal the way a hand sits over a glass. It was not raining. It was only promising to. Mason stood between the bumper and the sliding doors in his tan jacket, slight for eight, his short light-brown hair lifting and falling, both hands locked on the straps of the blue backpack as if the straps were the only agreement he still trusted.
People with better plans moved around him. A shuttle sighed. A horn went off and gave up.
“Dad,” Mason said, in the small voice he used when he was trying not to be heard by the whole world, “don’t make me get on it.”
Lauren straightened. The camel overcoat was belted tight. Her blonde hair was in a low ponytail and the wind had already worked one strand loose along her neck. She looked at the doors, then at the boy, then at a place just past Derek’s shoulder, which was where she looked when she did not want a face to answer her. “Mason. We are going to miss it.”
Derek heard the sentence as logistics. He had been hearing the morning as logistics since five, when the alarm had not gone off and Lauren had already been dressed, when the suitcases had already been zipped in the hall. He looked at his son’s hands. The old uselessness arrived, the one that showed up whenever Mason went quiet in public and Derek could not find the lever that made him ordinary again. “Why is he like this?”
Mason’s mouth trembled and set. “Mom said you aren’t coming.”
For a second Derek only heard the airport. Then the sentence landed.