The club keeps hosting.
The microphone keeps working for other fathers.
This father does not get it.
Save it.
He saved it too long.
She spent her line and left.
End on the garden if you must: medium-wide, lights on, toast dead, bride in satin already on the grass, summer holding everything except the family.
That is the picture.
That is the story.
That is enough to close the night and open the years.
On an ordinary Tuesday a long time after, Claire carried groceries up the apartment stairs—they had stayed in the shaking-dishwasher building longer than planned—and the bag broke. Oranges rolled. She sat on a step and laughed until she cried. James found her and picked up oranges. He said garden? She said groceries. He said good. They ate the bruised ones first.
Good is a small country.
They lived there often.
Not always.