Cody said, “Is it bigger than a bread box?”
Tom laughed. “Who taught you bread box?”
“Mom. She says Grandma used to say it.”
“Your grandma was right about boxes. Sleep.”
He kissed the dirty-blond hair. He turned off the lamp. In the hall he found Laura with her arms crossed over the cream sweater she had already laid out for morning.
“He’s going to lose his mind,” Tom said.
Laura said, “He’s going to say whatever comes into his head.”
Tom heard a joke. He did not hear a warning. He put his hand on her waist, the gold band cold for a second against the sweater, and she let him. She even leaned in. That lean would later look like a last kindness or a last lie. In the moment it was only a woman standing in a hallway on Christmas Eve, smelling pine and fire and the faint plastic of new toys, and not yet being asked to account for the nights the porch light had watched someone else come up the walk.
The plant at night was a country with its own weather.
Tom learned the country well enough to survive it and not well enough to love it. Fluorescent light. The particular smell of heated dust and cold metal. Men younger than him who still had the energy to complain as if complaining changed a shift. Men older than him who had stopped complaining and looked at Tom as if he were visiting. He was visiting. That was the deal he had made with March. Visit the nights, send the money home, return to daylight when the roof stopped arguing.