The house was a rented narrow place in Swissvale with a porch that sagged in the middle and a maple that dropped keys into the gutters every year. Derek liked it more than Lauren did. She wanted, someday, a window that did not face a neighbor’s kitchen. He wanted a mortgage that would not eat the clinic shifts. They had been saving in a jar and in an account and in the vague way of people who believe time is a kind of money. The jar was for a transmission the car had been threatening. The account was for a month when one of them might be between things. There was also, he would learn before the night was over, another account, but the afternoon did not know that yet.
He carried Mason inside without waking him all the way and laid him on the couch. The boy’s hand found the backpack strap even in sleep. Jonah stood in the doorway of the kitchen as if the linoleum were a border crossing.
“You can come in,” Derek said.
“I don’t want to track any of this onto his floor more than I have.”
“It’s my floor too. Come in. Sit. Don’t make a speech and don’t make me make one.”
Jonah sat. Lauren filled a glass of water and then another, because doing things with her hands had always been her way of not fleeing. She put crackers on a plate no one had asked for. The pink suitcase stood in the hall beside the blue one like two guests who had misunderstood the invitation.