“She said what?”
Lauren’s hand found the shoulder of the tan jacket and did not quite rest there. Her mouth made the shape she used with waiters and with Mason’s teacher, a smile that asked to be believed on credit. “He heard it wrong.”
A police cart went by. The trunk lid dipped and Derek caught it again, harder than he needed to. The blue suitcase had a scuff on one corner. The pink one still had the paper tag from a trip he had not been on, a conference, she had said, in the spring. He had driven them here. He had paid for the airport garage in his head as a kind of participation. He had not asked to see the reservation because asking, in their house, had started to feel like an accusation before anyone opened a mouth.
“Show me the tickets.”
“Not on the curb.”
She reached for the pink suitcase handle as if the conversation could be zipped into it. Mason had the paper anyway. Derek saw it then: a printed sheet, creased down the middle, working its way out of the backpack’s front pocket beside a library barcode and a chewed pencil. The boy was trying to push it back in and also, plainly, trying not to. His eyes were on Derek and they were scared, not of the airplane, Derek thought, or not only of the airplane. Scared the way a child is scared when he has been carrying a fact alone and the fact has gotten too heavy for his size.