He went and turned off the music. In the silence he could hear the cicadas, and far away, the hiss of traffic on the 60, and inside the house, very faintly, the sound of someone crying. He could not tell whether it was Melissa or Tyler. He stood there a long time before he could make himself go in.
* * *
Tyler went to his room before Eric came back inside, and he locked the door. They heard the music start through the ceiling, loud and furious, something with no melody and a lot of drums. Neither of them told him to turn it down.
Eric and Melissa sat at the kitchen table, the one they had bought at an estate sale in Gilbert the year they moved into this house, with the burn mark from the time Tyler set a hot pan on it at twelve, trying to make pancakes for Mother's Day. The trays of buns were still on the counter. Neither of them had thought to put anything away. It was after ten. Melissa had changed out of the floral dress into an old Arizona State T-shirt and sweatpants, and with her hair pulled back and her face swollen from crying, she looked younger and older at once, like the girl he had met at a friend's birthday party in Tempe when she was twenty-one and also like someone he had never met at all.
"Tell me," he said. "All of it. From the beginning. Don't leave anything out to protect me. I think I've been protected enough."
She flinched, but she nodded.
"You remember what that year was like," she said.