Marcus looked at the clock on the stove. It was 9:48.
"You can still make it," he said. "If you leave now. If you want to."
She looked at him for a long time.
"Do you still want to go?" he said.
Upstairs the drums went on and on through the ceiling. Down the hall a drawer slammed, and then another. Danielle took her hand off the back of the chair and put it over her face, and stood like that, and when she took it away she was crying, finally, really crying, without a sound.
"Not tonight," she said.
Caleb was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed with his headphones on and Rex in his lap, and he was not watching anything. The tablet lay dark beside him on the comforter. The music was coming out of the headphones by themselves, plugged into nothing, or into the tablet with the screen off; Marcus could not tell. When the door opened his son pulled the headphones down around his neck and the drums came out loud and small into the room, and he fumbled for the tablet and stopped them.
Marcus sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped and Caleb slid a little toward him and did not move away.