9. across a gaping sea

Phillip went to bed at 8:15. He wore footy pajamas with cartoon elephants playing tennis and soccer and basketball across sleeves and legs and behinds and bellies. He slept easily and did not stir when Dolores crawled into the corner of the room next to the closet and gently tugged the carpet free. It gave and folded back toward her, revealing scuffed hardwood and tack strips.

Dolores flattened her hand and dug under the carpet until her fingertips felt paper edge. In three tries, the ragged flooring let loose its grip, and she pulled free the dirty greeting card envelope. Inside, a birthday card, a princess in a castle, a fairy tale window framing endless green hills and blue sky and fluffy broccoli trees. "Love, Garrison-Dad" and a photograph.

He was handsome, and his wife was pretty (…but too empty to be useful, her mother had said, before tossing the photo back to her across the kitchen table. Why would he send you this? Asshole.). The children--one just an infant--her siblings who did not know it, posed smiling on a bench under a tree with their parents, arms around one another. It was like an ethnographic study of a foreign culture, somewhere across a gaping sea where the seasons fell in reverse. Dolores wanted to understand this way of being in the world--as family, connected--but could not. Fifteen years had passed since this card and this photograph had arrived in the mail, and Dolores felt the same lopsided ache that spread through her chest then.

She folded the card and the photograph into a stiff and awkward rectangle, and slid it into her pocket along with the magnet from their trip to Mount Rushmore with a man named Patrick who had pined openly for her mother until his pride left him a ragged and discombobulated mess of bones in clothes. Her mother could do this to a man.

Once home, she would undo her treasures into a dresser drawer and pretend for a moment that resolution was possible.

8. messy piles of noise.

He was spending too much time in the car. If this were to continue, he would remember to pack granola bars and graphing paper in the glove compartment.

Richard did not like the chatter of radio and left it off, listening only to the throaty bass of his college-aged neighbor's stereo rattling window panes and mashing indistinguishable melody lines into messy piles of noise.

"You could go to the store," he said aloud. But he didn't need anything, and it was not like him to shop without aim or spend without purpose. It also was not like him to exercise indiscretion and invite strange young women to his home to watch his son. He would remain parked and ready should it all turn south--fires, intruders, disallowed parties. Harm to Phillip would reflect unfavorably on him. A judge in a black robe would shake her head while reviewing his file of psychiatric diagnoses and wonder how it had ever been allowed to pass that he should be granted charge of a child without supervision.

Thirty-two minutes had passed. The woman who lived kitty-corner from him backed out of her driveway in a red Grand Prix and waved in her rearview mirror before pulling ahead. Richard was unsure if she was waving at him behind her or at something he did not see before her, and so he did not wave back.