Afterward they did not go to a restaurant. Mason was spent in the way of people who have been looked at. They ended up, by the odd gravity of the city, near the airport road, because Jonah’s bus to an early shift passed that way and Derek had offered the ride and Lauren had the car seat of snacks Mason was now too old for and still raided. They pulled into the cell phone lot to kill ten minutes and then, because Mason asked, they drove up the ramp to the departures curb, not to go anywhere, just to see it. He wanted, he said, to look at the doors without a suitcase. Thirteen had made him tall in the wrists and still slim, his hair a little darker, his face beginning to choose an adult arrangement without having finished. He got out. They got out with him. The evening was cold and clear, not the overcast of that other morning. The curb smelled like fuel and bread from a kiosk inside.
A family down the lane was having a day of it. A small child refused to walk. A father looked at the sky as if the sky scheduled flights. Derek looked away, granting them the privacy of not being a lesson. Mason watched for a second longer than politeness and then turned to his own people.
“I still have the paper,” he said.
Derek didn’t understand at once. Lauren did. Her hand went to the belt of her coat and stayed there.
“The one from before,” Mason said. “It’s in the blue backpack in my closet. I don’t know why I kept it. The sticky note too. You can tell me to throw it out.”
“You can throw it out,” Lauren said. Her voice was quiet and unornamented. “You don’t have to. It’s your shelf.”