“If you go, tell me where so I can tell her something that isn’t a neighbor.”
He looked at the bag. He had put two shirts in it and then not known what else a man takes when he is only trying to see if he can. He picked it up. He put it back in the closet. He said, “I’m not good at leaving. That isn’t the same as staying well.”
Ana said, “Stay badly then. Stay while we learn the other way. If you decide the other way is gone I will help you pack for real.”
He hated the fairness in that. He needed it.
They went to a counselor in a strip mall because the hospital benefits covered six sessions. The counselor was a woman named Ruiz who did not flinch at driveways. She asked Diego what he wanted. He said he wanted to stop seeing a black car when any sedan slowed. She asked Ana what she wanted. Ana said she wanted to be believed when she said it was over, and she knew belief was not an item she could demand at a counter. Ruiz said six sessions would not finish a marriage. Six sessions might teach them not to use Lila as a messenger. They already knew that. They went anyway. On the fourth session Diego cried and was angry that he cried. Ruiz said anger at crying is just more crying with a fist. He laughed once. Ana looked at him as if the laugh were a country she had missed.
They did not tell Lila about Ruiz. They told Lila they had meetings. Lila said meetings were boring. She was correct.
Diego’s supervisor at St. Mary’s asked if he wanted days instead of second shift. Diego said yes. The supervisor said it would take a month to move him. Diego said a month was fine. Coming home at five would not erase winter. It would put his car in the driveway at an hour that had belonged to someone else. He wanted that hour back as concrete, not as theory.
When the shift change came, Lila met him at the door some days. She did not meet him with a fob. She met him with a drawing or a complaint about Sam. Sam had stopped eating glue and started eating crayons. Progress, Diego said. Lila said crayons taste worse. He said good.
Ana reduced her extra hours at the office. The manager asked if everything was all right. Ana said she needed to be on time for pickup. The manager, who had children, signed the change. Ana took the stairs. She became a person who left at five and did not look at the third-floor board. Once she saw Eric at a far elevator. He lifted a hand. She did not. The doors closed on him. She stood on two and shook and then went to her desk and finished a column of numbers that did not care.
At home that night she told Diego she had seen him.
Diego said, “Did he speak.”
“No.”
“Did you.”
“No.”
“All right.”
All right is a small house. They lived in it.
A year later the toy truck still lived in the basket, wheel attached. Lila was six. She could write her name. She did not write Eric. She did not write driveway. She wrote LILA in big letters and taped it to her door.
Diego still had gray at the temples. More of it. Ana still wore the cream sweater on cool nights and still stood at the rack when it rained. Sometimes Diego came up behind her and put his hand on the place between her shoulders, not as a claim, as a presence. Sometimes she leaned back. Sometimes she did not. Both were information.
They were not a commercial. They were a middle unit with hardwood and a lamp and school photos and a coffee table that still had a faint mark from a screwdriver. They were a hospital badge and a dental-office login and a child who had once worn a hat too big for her head.