Laura was quiet long enough for a truck to pass the plant gate. “Just come home when you can.”
He came home at dawn and stood in Cody’s doorway and watched the boy sleep with his mouth open and the dirty-blond hair smashed to one side. The room smelled like boy and carpet and the faint electric dust of a game system that had been on too late. Tom did not go in far enough to see the brand on the console under the T-shirt. He whispered, “I’m proud of you,” to a person who could not hear him, which is sometimes the only way a night-shift father gets to say it.
Laura was awake in the kitchen with coffee she did not want. He kissed her temple. She let him. He said the concert video had wrecked him. She said, “Good. It should.” He took that as intimacy. It was intimacy. It was also an unpaid bill.
There was a night in October when Ben almost did not come, and then did.
Laura had texted that she was tired. Ben had replied that tired was allowed. She had put the phone face down. An hour later the porch light caught his truck and she felt the old mix of relief and dread that had become her evening weather. Cody was still up, which made the visit decent. They ate cereal for dinner because Laura did not have the will to make the lasagna motif again. Ben asked Cody about a science worksheet. Cody explained the water cycle with great authority and two errors. Ben did not correct the errors. Laura watched them and thought, This is what it would look like if I had married a man who was home. The thought was unfair to Tom and accurate about the hour. Unfair and accurate can live in the same head. They did, that night, in hers.
After Cody’s door closed, Ben stood in the living room near the brick fireplace that was dark and said, “You look like you want me to leave.”
Laura said, “I want a lot of things.”
“Which one do you want tonight.”
She could have said leave. The word was small. She said, “Stay a little,” which was smaller in the way that matters less to a conscience and more to a calendar. They did not go to the bedroom first. They sat on the beige carpet like teenagers who had missed the age on purpose. The television threw a muted something at the wall. Later the house made the sounds a house makes when two adults think a child is deeper asleep than he is. Cody woke, heard the low laugh, smiled into his pillow because the house was not empty, and went back under.
In the morning Laura found him in the kitchen pouring cereal with the concentration of a surgeon. “Uncle Ben still here?” he asked.