They retrieved the suitcases from the car and then, because the world is admin even in the middle of a life breaking open, Lauren stood at a counter and undid the tickets while a patient agent clicked and did not ask why a woman’s hands shook. The fees were bad. Derek heard the number and put it in the column of later. Jonah waited with Mason by a pillar. Derek watched them from the line. Jonah did not touch the boy. He pointed at a moving walkway and said something that made Mason shake his head, almost interested. The blue backpack stayed on. Some bargains could not be renegotiated in a single hour.
On the drive home the car was full of weather. Not talk. The pink suitcase and the blue one were in the trunk again, Jonah’s duffel across his knees in the front because the back was Mason’s country and no one was going to invade it. Derek took the tunnel and then the river road. Pittsburgh showed itself in pieces: a bridge, a billboard for a lawyer, the color of the water like metal. He had met Lauren in this city. He had thought, for years, that this was a simple fact and therefore a sturdy one.
He had been thirty-one at the wedding and she had been twenty-nine, though he had not known the arithmetic of her first life then, only the number she offered. His cousin’s wedding, a fire hall in Bloomfield, too many folding chairs, a toast section that would not end. Derek had gone outside to stand by the service door where the caterers smoked. Lauren was already there, camel coat even in May, because the hall was cold in the way of halls that trust alcohol to do the heating. She had borrowed a lighter from a stranger and was not smoking. She was only holding the lighter as a reason to be outside.
“You don’t look like you want that,” he had said, meaning the lighter, meaning the wedding, meaning the performance of joy that had driven them both into the alley.
“I want the ten minutes,” she had said. “The lighter is a costume.”
He had liked her voice. It was low and exact, no syrup in it. She asked what he did and did not over-laugh when he said he taped ankles and argued with sixteen-year-old quarterbacks about ice. Athletic trainer, high school, plus shifts at a clinic when the rent outran the school district. She said she wrote grants. She said it the way other people said they did taxes, as a craft that kept beautiful things from dying of administration. She was in from Philadelphia for the bride, her college roommate. She hated when people clinked glasses for kissing. He hated when people said the couple was “meant to be,” as if the rest of the room were a failed draft. They stood there until a dishwasher came out and needed the door. Lauren gave the lighter back to a man who had not asked for it. Derek asked if she wanted food that had not been served with a speech. She said yes with a quickness that startled them both.