A laugh from Mrs. Chen’s television, faint.
“Since winter,” she said.
Winter to a rainy night near the end of a school year is not a cup of coffee. It is months of errands that were not errands. It is Tuesdays. It is a cap.
Diego nodded as if a number had been written on the counter.
He went to the front window and looked at the driveway. Empty now. Honda. Rain in the oil stains. No black car. The car did not have to be there. The fob was on the counter. The hat was on the counter. Lila’s sentence was in the room.
The one that comes when you’re at work.
He had been proud of the work. He had been proud of extra shifts. He had been proud of plates heated 90 seconds. Pride sat next to the badge and looked like a fool.
Ana stayed at the island.
She did not come to the window.
The townhouse was small enough that a window and an island are still the same fight.
In the morning Lila asked for the hat with her cereal.
Ana said the hat went home.
“It lives here,” Lila said.
Diego, who had not slept except in pieces, said, “The hat has its own house.”
Lila accepted houses. She did not accept why the grown-ups looked like the rain had come inside their faces. She went to daycare with a backpack and a drawing of a car that Ana saw when she zipped the bag and did not comment on. The car was black. Lila had used the dark crayon down to a stub.
Diego drove to St. Mary’s and moved through the corridors like a man made of tasks. A door closer. A clogged drain in a utility sink. A nurse who said you look terrible. He said allergies. She did not believe him and did not have time to be a counselor. At lunch he sat in his car in the staff lot and looked at other people’s fobs hanging from ignitions and felt the plastic in Lila’s hand all over again.
He did not text Ana. He did not call Eric, whose last name he did not have yet. He sat. Then he went back in and replaced a fluorescent tube because the tube did not care who parked in whose driveway.
Ana called in to the dental office with a voice that said migraine. She did not have a migraine. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and wrote a message to Eric and deleted it and wrote it again. The second version said do not come here again. He wrote back already in the car. She wrote I mean the house. He wrote we should talk. She wrote my daughter had your key. After that he did not write for an hour. Then he wrote I am sorry. Sorry from a black car is a cheap fuel. She put the phone face down.
Mrs. Chen knocked at ten because she had heard Lila leave and wanted to know if they needed her Thursday. Ana opened the door. Mrs. Chen looked at her face and said, “You want tea or you want me to go.”
“Go is fine.”