Eric drove the rest of the way home in the dark with the radio off, listening to Tyler breathe.
* * *
It would have been a better story, Eric thought later, if everything had gotten easier after that. It didn't.
Through October and into November, Tyler spent every other weekend in Tucson. He went to Sofia's games and sat in the bleachers with Rosa, who brought folding cushions and a thermos of champurrado and taught him the words to shout at referees. He started a Spanish class on an app and practiced at the dinner table, rolling his r's badly while Lily corrected him from her own school Spanish lessons. He came home talking about things Eric had never heard of, cousins in Nogales, a great-great-grandfather who had worked the copper mines in Bisbee, a family quinceañera in December he was invited to. He was alive in a way he had not been since the barbecue, and Eric was glad, truly glad, and it was also like watching his son walk slowly into another room and close the door.
In the evenings, Eric and Melissa saw a therapist in Chandler, a calm, gray-haired woman named Dr. Halvorsen who kept a box of tissues on every flat surface of her office. They sat on opposite ends of a green couch. Melissa talked, and cried, and apologized, and Eric mostly sat with his arms folded and said very little, until one night in the sixth session, when Dr. Halvorsen asked him what he was most afraid of, and he heard himself say, "That I was a placeholder. That my whole life was something she arranged so the baby would have someone. That if I'd known the truth she'd have let me go." And Melissa turned to him on the green couch with her face streaming and said, "Eric, I lied because I was terrified of losing you. Not because I didn't want you. Do you understand? It was the most selfish thing I've ever done, and I did it because I couldn't stand to live without you," and he did not have an answer, but he unfolded his arms.
The fight happened on the second Friday in November.
Lily's third-grade class was putting on a play about the Sonoran Desert, and Lily had been cast, to her enormous pride, as a saguaro cactus. She had a costume made of green felt and pool noodles, and she had been rehearsing her one line, "I can live for two hundred years!", in every room of the house for three weeks. The play was at six. At five-thirty Tyler came downstairs with his backpack and the keys to the F-150 and said he was heading to Tucson; Sofia had a tournament semifinal in the morning, and Daniel had said he could stay over.