“We are two people who have a son asleep upstairs and another son in a house by a river, and a lot of true sentences we didn’t used to have,” Derek said. “We are not fixed. We are not finished. I don’t want to decide the marriage tonight. I want to live in the same facts for a while and see if I can stand the woman who tells them. That’s the most honest offer I have.”
She nodded. She looked at her hands. “I’ll take that. I won’t spend it faster than you make it.”
He believed she meant it that night. Believing her meaning and trusting her future were different muscles, and only one of them was tired enough to rest.
The months that followed were not a montage he would have chosen to watch, but they were specific, and specificity kept them from turning into either a ruin or a myth. He and Lauren slept in the same bed for two weeks and then he moved to the couch for a month, not as a speech, as a way of not lying with his body. Mason noticed and was told the truth in one sentence: Dad is angry and sad and he needs a little room inside the house, and the house is still the house. Mason had said, “Like Jonah on the porch,” and Derek had said, “A little like that,” and felt the comparison teach him something he did not enjoy.
They went to a counselor above a pharmacy who did not save them and did make them repeat things without the short sentence. Derek named what he had ignored because it was inconvenient: the cousin in the photograph, the size of Ruth’s tears, his preference for a wife with no preceding chapter. Lauren said she had mistaken his steadiness for a reason to keep him in the dark. Insurance covered eight sessions. They used eight. They did not become new.
In December Jonah came up on a ticket he had bought himself and reported the fact without flourish. He stayed four nights, took Mason to the aviary and did not lose him, and watched a bad football game with Derek after bedtime. He said Mason was lucky, and that he did not mean it as a knife. Derek said, “You’re allowed to want what the adoption didn’t give you. You don’t have to turn me into a moral to want it.” Jonah said he was still mad at Lauren and had also called her when the truck made a noise. Both things, he said. Derek said both things could sit in the same chair.