By August she was keeping it on purpose.
She told herself stories that a thirty-nine-year-old woman knows are stories. Ben is family. Ben is helping. Tom is never here. The boy needs a man in the room when the furnace clicks. The boy did need a man in the room. The boy did not need the rest of what the room became after he went to sleep. Laura knew the difference. Knowing the difference did not stop her. It only taught her how to close a bedroom door softly and how to be in the kitchen with wet hair when Cody woke at midnight looking for water.
She was not a villain in the cheap sense. She was a woman who had gotten tired of being married to a schedule. She still packed Tom’s lunches some weeks. She still kissed his temple when he came in at dawn smelling like cold air and metal. She still wore the band. She still hung three stockings. The cream sweater on Christmas night was not a costume of innocence so much as a habit of looking like a mother. Mothers can look like mothers and still be the reason a child’s sentence will end a room.
Cody loved Uncle Ben the way nine-year-olds love adults who show up.
Uncle Ben brought pizza without asking what the house had planned. Uncle Ben knew the names of Cody’s school friends and pretended the names mattered. Uncle Ben sat on the beige carpet and lost at the old console on purpose, then on accident, then on purpose again. Uncle Ben said Tom was working hard and that working hard was a kind of love, which was a sentence a child can carry to bed and a sentence a mother can hide inside.
On a Thursday in October, when Tom was on a double and the house felt like a held breath, Ben brought a large box with a bow that was trying too hard. It was a PlayStation 5. Cody’s mouth opened in the exact shape it would later open for a different box.
“Is it from Dad?” Cody asked.
Laura looked at Ben. Ben looked at Laura. The look was a whole conversation and a whole cowardice.
“It’s from me,” Ben said. “A just-because. Your dad’s got a lot on his plate.”
Laura should have said no. A wife who is still choosing her marriage says no to a gift that large from a man who already has a key to the quiet hours. She said, “Say thank you,” because the box was already in her son’s arms and because refusing it would have required an explanation she was not prepared to give a nine-year-old on a school night.