"Does Mommy—" He stopped. He looked at the lane ahead. "Is Mommy nice to him?"
"Uh-huh. She makes him take home leftovers. For his sisters." June's face clouded. "Daddy, he told me not to wear his shirt. I took it from the hook. Is he going to be mad?"
"I don't think so, bug."
"Mommy said it was a surprise for you. Danny working. And then I told. I wrecked the surprise."
He pulled up in front of the house and put the truck in park and sat a moment, and then he reached over and put his hand on top of her head, on the warm auburn crown of it where the braids parted.
"You didn't wreck anything," he said. "You told me the truth. That's never wrecking anything. You hear me?"
She nodded under his hand. Then she said, "Can I still have the gloves?" and he laughed, and the laugh hurt him in some place he could not locate.
But it was not the laugh that stayed with him as she ran up the steps into the house. It was the shame. He sat in the truck with the engine ticking and felt it climbing up the back of his neck: that he had just done to her, in a hundred yards of lane, almost exactly the thing he was angriest at Claire for. He had used her. He had made her his little go-between. And the other thing that stayed with him, underneath the shame, was smaller and colder and harder to look at. A white truck with one green door. He had seen a truck like that. He could not, for the moment, remember where.