They got pierogies from a place that was still open and ate them in his car because the tables were full of a softball team. She told him about Ruth, a little. About a river town in North Carolina and a father who fixed things by hitting them correctly. She did not mention a brother. He understood later that the omission had already been a habit by then, a muscle exercised so long it no longer registered as a choice. At the time it was only a woman in his passenger seat with grease on her thumb, telling him she did not want children someday in a speech, she wanted them in a house, and she was afraid she was not the kind of person houses trusted.
“That’s a strange thing to say on a first not-date,” he had said.
“I’m bad at the early part,” she had said. “I skip to the load-bearing walls.”
He had thought that was honesty. It was honesty and it was also a locked room with the lights on, and he had been so glad to be let into any room at all that he had not knocked on the walls.
She moved to Pittsburgh the next spring. They married the year after that, in a small ceremony his sister Denise organized because Lauren did not want Ruth and Howard to make a wedding into a verdict. The Brennans came anyway. Howard wore a suit that fit him ten years earlier. Ruth cried in a way that seemed larger than the occasion and Lauren held her a long time in the fellowship-hall kitchen, and Derek, passing with a stack of plates, heard Ruth say, “You get to be happy. Do you hear me? You are allowed,” and Lauren say, “Stop,” and Ruth say, “I will not stop. I buried the other version. Let me look at this one.” He had thought it was mother-talk, the ordinary excess of women at weddings. He had put it down as not his language. That had been his own omission. He could see it now, on the parkway, with Jonah Brennan’s reflection faint in the passenger window. He had been offered a strange sentence and had translated it into a familiar one because the familiar one did not require him to interrupt the day.
Mason fell asleep before the Squirrel Hill tunnel, which was a mercy. His head tipped against the seatbelt in a way that would hurt later. Derek watched him in the mirror and kept driving.