Owen wanted to show him everything. He showed him a loose tooth and the gap where a tooth used to be. He showed him the Lego Star Destroyer, nearly finished, the instruction booklet bristling with sticky notes. He showed him a spelling test with a sticker, a drawing of a tank with DAD written on its side in wobbly capitals, and the growth marks on the pantry doorframe. That last one Daniel had to stand very still for: six pencil lines since the one he had made himself in October, each dated in Claire's neat print. He showed him the dog tag again. He showed him how he could do a cartwheel now, almost.
Daniel looked at all of it. He was good at looking. He had spent eleven months reading rooftops and roadside culverts and the angle of a parked car. Now, without meaning to, he read his own house.
The downstairs bathroom had a new faucet, brushed nickel instead of chrome, put in level and caulked clean. The garbage disposal, jammed when he left, ran smooth when Owen proudly flipped the switch. Through the kitchen window he could see the back deck had been power-washed, and the gutters along the eave were clean. The big limb off the white oak, the one hanging over the shed for two years, was gone, and the stump had been cut flush. Someone had done careful, competent work all over this house. Someone had liked doing it. You could tell that from the work.
There was nothing else. No second toothbrush, no man's jacket on the hooks by the garage door, no size-eleven sneakers kicked off by the mat. The house was cleaner than he had ever seen it, vacuum lines still standing in the living room carpet. When he went upstairs to change, the bed in the master bedroom had been stripped and made up with sheets he didn't recognize, still creased from the package. The air smelled of lemon cleaner. An hour and twenty minutes, he thought. That was how long she'd had since his call. He pictured her moving through the rooms, and the picture was so precise and so terrible that he sat down on the edge of the stiff new sheets and stayed there a while, in his uniform, with his hands open on his knees.