In the morning the house pretended, for almost an hour, that it was a house. Derek made eggs. Mason set out four forks without being asked and then looked embarrassed by his own arithmetic, and Jonah said four was correct and took the fork as if it were a job he intended to do well. They did not discuss the envelope at the table. Jonah had the number now. He had said, late, in the kitchen, that he didn’t want a ceremony about it. He wanted Claire to know. He wanted a chunk kept back for Howard’s stair rail and the appointments Howard pretended he did not have. The rest he would think about without a mother and a stepfather watching him think. He had used the word stepfather and then stopped, unsure whether he had promoted or insulted the man across the table. Derek had said, “You can say my name. We don’t have a title that isn’t going to pinch.”
After breakfast Mason went to his room and came back with a sheet of paper he had not been asked for. It was a map, the kind he drew when the world got too spoken. Their street was a line. The airport was a box with wings. Wilmington was a wavy edge at the bottom because rivers, in Mason’s maps, were obligations. Between the house and the airport he had drawn four figures. One had a backpack. One had a ponytail, which on a stick figure was a single brave line. One was taller. One had no features yet.
“That’s you,” he said to Derek, pointing at the unfinished man. “I didn’t know what face you were making.”
“That’s fair,” Derek said. “I didn’t know either.”
Lauren, from the doorway, looked at the map as if it might be entered into evidence, which in a way it was. She had slept, or had been horizontal. The camel coat was on the banister. She had not put it on. In a sweatshirt she looked less like a woman trying to make a flight and more like the person who had eaten pierogies in his car and told him she skipped to the load-bearing walls. He did not feel tenderness exactly. He felt recognition, which was sterner and more useful.
She told him about the fares while Mason was in the yard showing Jonah the place where the maple roots had buckled the sidewalk. They sat on the front steps. The street was Sunday-quiet. She did not decorate it.