There was also the sentence Richard used when he was losing.
He never said it in front of company. He said it in the bedroom, low, as if volume could make it less true. “He chose you.” Megan said, “He chose a family.” Richard said, “He looked at you.” Megan said, “You were standing right there.” The argument had variations. All of them ended with Richard staring at the courthouse photograph as if the photograph had cheated.
Andre heard enough.
He was sixteen, not four. He knew the temperature of the kitchen before he entered it. He knew when Richard’s voice had the particular tightness that meant the night would not end with a ball game on the TV. He knew Megan’s mascara ran in two directions: sad and fighting. Tonight it was fighting. He had been in his room with headphones that were not on. He had heard the first rise of the argument through the floor, the way a person hears weather in the walls. He had come down the hall in the charcoal hoodie because the house had a sound he did not like.
They were already at the island when he reached the doorway.
The fight had started, as their fights often started, with a small fact that was not small. Richard had come home late. Megan had asked where. He had said work. She had said the office lights were off when she drove past. He had said she was checking up on him. She had said she was married to him. The wine had been poured as if wine could make the next sentences polite. It had not. By the time Andre saw them, Megan was naming a thing Richard did not want named — not another woman, not exactly, but a pattern of absences, a hardness in his mouth when he looked at the boy, a way of saying this family that left a person outside it.
Richard said she was rewriting history.
Megan said history had a courthouse in it.
Richard put his glass down hard enough to make the second glass shiver.