Afterward he sat in his car in the parking lot behind the dentist’s office for forty minutes with the engine off. Danielle sat beside him and did not say anything, and did not touch him, and did not leave.
They were not easy, those months. He would not pretend later that they were. There were nights they lay back to back in the big bed without speaking, each of them awake, each of them knowing the other was awake. There was a fight in November, about nothing, about the dishwasher, that turned in the space of two sentences into a fight about the ticket with his name on it and whether she had really meant to let him come or had only been building herself an alibi, and he said a thing he regretted and she said a thing she did not, and he slept in the study. There was a morning in December when he came downstairs and found her at the kitchen table at five a.m. with the laptop open to the Delta website, and she closed it when he came in, and neither of them mentioned it, and he thought about it for a week. But she was still there. Every morning, she was still there. And every morning, he found, he was still choosing to be the man she had bought a ticket for.
He went to Bernice’s for Thanksgiving by himself and stayed an hour.
His mother was in the kitchen making the dressing, the way she had made it every Thanksgiving of his life, with the cornbread crumbled by hand and the celery cut fine and the sage from a jar that she said was better than fresh. She did not turn around when he came in. He stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her work, her hands moving through the bowl, the rings on her fingers, the slight new tremor in her left hand that he did not think had been there in September.
"How is he," she said, without turning around.
He took out his phone and found a picture and held it out. After a moment she wiped her hands on a dish towel and took the phone from him and looked at it. It was Caleb in his school’s Thanksgiving play, wearing a turkey costume made of brown felt and paper feathers, his arms flung wide, his mouth open mid-line, so obviously delighted to be a turkey that it was almost painful to look at.
His mother looked at it for a long time. She touched the screen once with one finger, very lightly, on the turkey’s paper head. Then she handed the phone back and returned to the dressing.
"He always did like a costume," she said.