"Then it just became true," he said. "Is that it? You just decided it was true?"
"No," Jenna said. "No. Nobody decided anything. That's the problem. Nobody ever decided anything at all."
He did not have anything to say to that. He turned away from her and found himself face to face with his mother, who had gotten up out of her chair without his noticing and walked across the patio barefoot, her feet still wet from the ice water, leaving dark prints on the concrete.
"Eric James," Carol said. She took his wrist in her small, papery hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. "What's happened?"
He looked down at her. He could not tell her. He could not say the words to his mother, here, under the string lights, with the smell of burgers and chlorine in the air. He thought of her holding Tyler on the day he was born, in the hospital room at Banner Desert, the way she had wept and said, He has your father's chin. She had said that. He has your father's chin. Eric's father had been dead a little more than a year by then, and those words had felt like a gift, like the old man had come back in some small, fierce form.
"I think," Eric said carefully, "we should probably wrap this up early, Mom."
Carol searched his face. Whatever she found there made her nod once, briskly. She let go of his wrist and turned around and clapped her hands twice, loud as gunshots, the way she used to clap to call her sons in from the street for dinner.