The locs conversation took a month. Andre came with pictures on a phone. Richard said the office would look. Megan said the office looked at a lot of things and still bought equipment. Richard said he was thinking of the boy’s ease in the world. Megan said ease in the world was not the same as ease in Richard’s office park. Andre sat through the talks like a person at his own trial. When Megan drove him to the appointment, Richard stayed home and mowed a lawn that did not need mowing. That night he said the taper looked clean. Andre said thanks, Dad. The thanks was real. The Dad was real. Richard stored both as evidence that the household was working.
It was working, in the ways households work. They ate in the kitchen more nights than they ate out. They had a shelf for school forms. They had a vet for a dog that died when Andre was twelve, and Richard dug the hole in the backyard himself and did not speak, which Andre took for grief and which was grief. They had Christmas mornings that looked like the refrigerator photos. They had arguments about phones and grades and whether sixteen was old enough to drive Richard’s car. Richard said no. Megan said yes with conditions. Andre passed the test on the first try and still asked before taking the keys. He was that kind of careful. Careful boys get tired of being careful. He was not yet too tired to come downstairs when the kitchen went wrong.
The year the money thinned, Richard began to narrate the house as a thing he had provided. Provided is a word that turns a family into an account. He provided the marble. He provided the street. He provided the lawyer from eleven years ago. Megan said she provided a living too. He said a teacher’s living was not the mortgage. The sentence landed and stayed in the cabinets. Andre, doing homework at the island, wrote a sentence about the Civil War and heard a war about who owned the air.
Megan did not leave. Leaving was a story she refused for a long time because she had stood in a courtroom and promised a boy a house that would not dissolve. She also loved Richard, which complicated the refusal. Love at forty-five can look like habit and still be love. She remembered the man who had held a four-year-old through a nightmare about a hallway. She remembered the man who had signed every paper. She remembered, less fondly, the man who used the papers as a receipt.
On a Thursday in October she found Richard in the garage with the courthouse photo in his hand, the one that also lived on the fridge. He said he was looking for a screwdriver. She said the photo was not a screwdriver. He said, “Do you ever think he would have said no if you’d asked him alone.” She said, “Don’t.” He said, “I’m asking.” She said, “You’re looking for a wound to live in.” He put the photo down. He did not apologize. The garage smelled like cold rubber. She went inside and made grilled cheese because grilled cheese was a language Andre still accepted without suspicion.
Andre ate the grilled cheese and asked if they were fighting. Megan said adults talk. He said talking louder is fighting. She said he was not wrong. He said, “If he says I don’t belong, I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear it.” She put her hand on his head, on the neat locs, and said, “You belong.” He said, “Because of you.” She said, “Because of us.” He looked at her the way he had looked at her in the courtroom, as if us were a word she could sign for two people.
That was eight weeks before the night of the wine glasses.
Richard spent those eight weeks becoming a man who needed to win something. The market did not let him win. The boy did not look at him first. Megan did not back down in the bedroom. Winning shrank to the size of a kitchen island and a hand on a shoulder. He would not have called it violence. Men like Richard have a vocabulary that keeps their hands innocent: emphasis, frustration, making her listen. The shove would be light. The light would not matter to the counter at her back or to the boy who had been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, to put his body in the only door that still made sense to him.
The evening began with leftover pasta and a news show no one watched. Andre ate in his room because a project was due. Richard poured wine at the island as if the island were a bar in another life. Megan came in from folding laundry with her hair already losing the clip. She asked about a voicemail from the mortgage desk. He said he would handle it. She said handling it meant calling back. He said he would not be managed in his own kitchen. She said it was their kitchen. The photographs on the refrigerator listened like a chorus that could not enter.