In March of the second year a pipe burst in the upstairs bath and water came through the kitchen ceiling. Evan shut the valve. Darren, because he was already on the street for a Wednesday that had moved to Tuesday, held the bucket. They stood under the drip and did not discuss the doorway. They discussed the valve. A plumber came. The ceiling dried. A stain remained, the shape of a state nobody had visited. Megan looked at the stain and said they could paint. Evan said next weekend. Darren said he had a roller. The roller was not an invitation to move back in. It was a roller. They painted on a Saturday while Grace napped at Janelle’s. The stain went under white. The white was not innocence. It was paint. Megan said so. Both men nodded. They cleaned the brushes. Somebody made sandwiches. The sandwiches were turkey. Nobody called it a fresh start. The ceiling was simply no longer brown.
Helen asked, near the end of the sessions they had paid for, what each of them wanted from the next year that was not a verdict. Evan said he wanted to stop dreaming the porch. Megan said she wanted to tell the truth in daylight without a uniform forcing it. Darren said he wanted Wednesdays to feel ordinary. Helen wrote the three wants down and did not rank them. They left with the paper. Megan put it in the drawer with Karen’s copies. The drawer was full of paper that had kept them from improvising. She was grateful and tired of it in the same hour. Both were allowed.
Grace turned three on a day with cake from the grocery and a candle she blew sideways. Icing hit the half-wall. Evan wiped it. Darren caught the candle. Megan laughed, the kitchen laugh, the one that had surprised her in an ice storm and did not surprise her now. The sidelight showed only the walk, clear, no sheet of ice. Nobody was arriving unannounced. The duffel was not by the door. The day finished in the tub, with Grace refusing to surrender a plastic cup, and Evan on the mat, and Megan in the doorway of the bathroom saying five more minutes, and the five minutes being given. Not a homecoming. A bath. She could live in a house that knew the difference.
Evan went to the attic in the fall looking for the Christmas bin and found the sign. Cardboard, marker, the letters slumped where the night before the first homecoming had been humid. WELCOME HOME. He sat on a trunk with it across his knees. Megan came up because she heard the hatch. She saw the sign and did not take it from him.