Mason nodded. He looked at the automatic doors, which opened for a stranger and closed on nothing. “I thought if I didn’t get on, you would have to tell,” he said. He was talking to both of them and to the boy he had been. “I didn’t have a better plan. I just didn’t want to be the only one who knew.”
“You weren’t supposed to be,” Derek said. “I’m sorry I asked why you were like that. You were like a person who knew something and was trying to get it out of the car.”
Mason’s mouth tightened, not quite a smile. Jonah, who had been standing with his hands in his pockets as if he might still be sent to wait by a pillar, said, “For what it’s worth, which you can set yourself, I’m glad you didn’t get on that one. The later one was better pretzels anyway.”
“You always bring it back to pretzels,” Mason said, and the sentence had so much ordinary brother in it that none of them touched it. Touching it would have made it glass.
Jonah’s bus time approached and then, because the boat shop called and the early shift became a later one, did not. They had nowhere to be. They stood in the cold a little longer. Derek thought of the trunk lid, the pink suitcase, the blue one, the name under the fold, the question he had asked into the wind. Who’s the extra seat? He knew the answer now in his body and not only on a page. The extra seat had been a son who was not a rumor. The two coming back had been a promise Lauren kept and a marriage they had not been able to keep in the same way, and those were different griefs, and he had stopped demanding that they wear the same coat. He was not happy in any simple tense. He was accurate. He was at the curb with his boy, and the boy was not afraid of the doors, and the woman he had loved and could not live inside a lie with was close enough to hear their son speak, and the young man the lie had cost was missing his bus on purpose, maybe, or by luck, and staying.
Mason shifted his weight toward the terminal, not away from it. The doors opened because a cart was coming through, and he caught the edge of one with the heel of his hand and held it, a small courtesy, until Jonah got the empty duffel he used as a catch-all through the gap. Nobody praised the gesture. The cold on Derek’s wrist felt like weather, not like a decision. Inside, the light was the same heated public light it had always been. Mason glanced back once, to be sure they were coming, and Derek lifted a hand, not a wave exactly, more like showing he still had it. Then he followed his son in, Lauren beside him, Jonah ahead, none of them holding on to anyone, and none of them, for those few steps, leaving.