They left the sign in the attic. It was not a relic they needed in the hall. It was a sentence from a marriage that had not yet had a glass on the half-wall. Downstairs Grace was stacking blocks wrong, on purpose, to hear them fall. They went down. The blocks fell. She laughed. The sign stayed above them, unread, which was the correct filing.
Ruth visited at Halloween and took Grace around the nearer houses in a pumpkin suit. Darren’s new street was not on the route. Evan’s armory jacket was. A neighbor two blocks over said the baby had grown. Ruth said babies did that. She did not offer the rest. In the car she told Megan, “You are allowed to be tired of being decent about this.” Megan said she was tired and also decent, and the combination was the job. Ruth said all right. They ate candy Grace was not allowed to have and then let her have one piece. The piece was chocolate. It got on the pumpkin suit. Nobody framed the stain as a lesson.
The water plant had a layoff scare in November. Darren told Megan on a Wednesday, plain, because hiding a scare was how the first trouble had grown. She told Evan that night, plain, because the house had a rule now about not deleting the sentence. Evan said if the money slipped, the support paper had a line for that. Darren already knew. He had read Karen’s pages. The layoff did not come. The telling had. Megan slept better for the telling than she had for the outcome. Outcomes were weather. Silence was a choice. She had made the other choice once, in March, and she was not making it again.
On the third homecoming anniversary that nobody celebrated, Evan cleaned the sidelight. He had been avoiding the glass. The cloth left streaks and he did them over. Megan came in with groceries and saw him at the door and understood without a speech. She set the bags down. She did not say not in the doorway. The doorway was empty. He was only cleaning it. She put a hand on his back, brief, and went to the kitchen. He finished the streaks. Outside, the walk was clear. Two doors down, the Civic was gone, sold, Janelle’s old car, a fact from before. He locked the door out of habit and unlocked it again because Grace’s stroller was still on the porch. Then he brought the stroller in. The duffel was not beside it. The evening was groceries and a clean pane and a child who would want the blue block after dinner. He could do that evening. He had learned it the long way, which was the only way it had been willing to be learned.