She told it plainly, because she had already confessed the outline in the kitchen and the daylight did not need a second performance. The one-way fares had been a few minutes of filthy relief, the picture of not having to watch his face, and then the other picture, Mason at Howard’s table asking when he could call his father. She had closed the laptop and failed to clear the search. Mason had heard the phone call with Claire while a towel dragged the hall, and had turned the bathwater on so the house would think he had been busy being eight. She did not ask for credit that the tab had been an accident.
“He has a right to the pieces he hasn’t handed me,” Derek said.
“When I booked the real tickets,” Lauren said, “the ones with a return, I told myself I was correcting the record. I printed the itinerary so I would stop living in the glow of the screen. I put it in my bag. Mason found it while I was in the shower yesterday morning. He put it in the backpack. I think he wanted a document in case everyone started saying he had dreamed it. I think he was going to show you on the curb even before he knew he was going to. He has more nerve than anyone in this house. That includes the twenty-year-old, and the twenty-year-old has nerve.”
Derek watched his son in the yard. Jonah was crouched, listening to an explanation of the root and the concrete that involved several hand gestures and no point that an adult needed to improve. The young man nodded as if the sidewalk were a serious civic issue. Maybe it was. Derek felt the anger still present, a coal, not a blaze. He also felt the day asking him for a decision that would not satisfy the coal.
“If you go down there,” he said, “you go to tell your father the truth in front of Jonah, not to manage Jonah back into the old word. Two nights, maybe three. Mason only if he says so after he hears the schedule without any surprise in it. I stay here. I will not be the man in the back of a family trip pretending we are normal in front of Howard. Howard and I can meet later, when I’m not a prop. I will be at arrivals. You text me the time when it’s real. If you miss the flight home, you call before the wheels-up you aren’t on, not after. Those are the terms. They’re not a reunion. They’re a railing.”
Lauren was quiet long enough that he thought she might argue herself back into the old plan. Then she said, “Yes. Those are the terms. I’ll ask Mason. If he says no, I still go, and Jonah goes if he wants, and I come back. I’m done making one child’s safety the excuse for another child’s silence.”