“He went home.”
“He should bring his toothbrush if he’s going to sleep over.”
Laura’s hand slipped on the fridge handle. “What.”
“Sleep over,” Cody said, cheerful, milky. “Like at Jake’s.”
“It’s not like at Jake’s.”
“How come.”
“Because Uncle Ben is a grown-up. Grown-ups come and go.”
Cody shrugged. The shrug meant he had a working model and her correction had not replaced it. She should have sat him down. She should have said, Dad is the only person who sleeps in this house with me. She did not say it, because saying it would have required her to make it true that same day, and she was not ready to be true that same day. She packed his lunch and kissed his hair and sent him to the bus and stood in the driveway after the bus was gone and thought, You are teaching him a schedule you cannot explain.
Tom, that same morning, ate a vending-machine breakfast and told a man on the line that his kid had a concert voice. The man said, “My kid doesn’t talk to me except to ask for money.” Tom said he was lucky. He believed he was lucky. Luck, when it is not checked, becomes a kind of sleep.
The week before Christmas the plant decorated a fake tree in the break room with tinsel that looked exhausted. Tom stood in front of it and felt a sudden anger at the smallness of the gesture, then felt ashamed of the anger, then put a five in the tin for the food drive and called it even. He texted Laura: Home by three on the 24th. Off the 25th. Whole day. She texted back: Good. Cody already picking the couch cushion where he’s going to sit. Tom sent a photo of the break-room tree. Laura did not reply to the photo. He told himself she was wrapping.