She texted Greg at six: Cake happening. Then at seven: She’s not done. Then at eight: Home late. Don’t wait up. Each text was a courtesy. Each courtesy was a key she did not know she was handing over. When she buckled Lucy into the booster at nine-forty, Lucy was already half asleep, icing at the corner of her mouth, a different pink than the lipstick that would come a week later. Helen kissed the icing and tasted sugar and child and thought of Greg on the recliner with a game on. She did not picture a champagne dress on a guest-room chair. The mind does not preview its own later evidence.
The drive home was dark in the ordinary suburban way. Strip malls. A church sign about Sunday. Lucy made a small sound in her sleep. Helen turned the radio low and did not sing. She felt, without naming it, the particular fatigue of a woman who has been pleasant in public for four hours. She wanted her slippers. She wanted the gray cardigan. She wanted a house that did not require her to be on. She got a house with a man in a damp-haired polo standing under the porch light as if he had been there all evening.
“How was it?” he asked.
“Loud. Good. She’s out.”
He lifted Lucy with the old competence. Helen followed them in and smelled soap that was too much soap. She thought, He showered. She thought, He mows in the heat and showers. It was September-into-fall Saturday, not heat. The thought sat down and did not get up again until the following Saturday, when a child walked in wearing the reason.
Greg set Lucy in her bed without turning on the overhead. He was gentle. Gentleness is not an alibi, but it is a fact. He stood in the dark and watched his daughter’s messy blonde hair on the pillow and felt the two rooms of himself try to occupy one body. The guest-room door was closed. He could not hear satin. Satin does not make a sound when it is waiting.
Helen brushed her teeth and looked at her own face and thought she looked like her mother. She hated that thought and then forgave it. Forty is an age at which a woman can still be surprised by her own tiredness. She got into bed. Greg got into bed. His hand found her hip. She let it stay. She was too glad to be home to interrogate the shower. That gladness would later feel like a door she had held open.
Sunday they did church late and pancakes and a hardware store because the bathroom faucet dripped. Greg talked to a clerk too long. Helen stood in an aisle of shower curtains and felt the draft of almost-knowing and bought nothing. Lucy sat in the cart and asked if they could get the shiny curtain, the one that looked wet even when it was dry. Helen said no. Lucy said the shiny one was prettier. Helen said pretty is not always the point. The sentence was about shower curtains. It would not stay about shower curtains.