PART 9:

That was documented elsewhere now. He signed the log, put it in the folder, and got his jacket. Lily was at the kitchen table when he got home, working on something with crayons and a large piece of paper that seemed to involve both a horse and what might have been a dragon or might have been a very ambitious dog. Dad.

She said it with the flat satisfaction of a person whose expectation has been confirmed. Hey, bug. Dana was at the stove doing something with garlic that immediately improved the quality of the air in the apartment. She looked at him when he came in. A look that was brief but thorough. The look of an older sister who had learned to read him accurately and efficiently.

Pasta’s almost ready, she said. Smells good. You look tired. I’m fine. She gave him the look that meant she didn’t believe him and had decided not to press it in front of Lily. They had gotten good at that particular choreography over the past 4 years. Communicating in the shorthand of people who had been through difficult things together and had learned when to push and when to let it sit.

He hung up his jacket. He sat down next to Lily and looked at her drawing. Is that a horse? He said. It’s a horse and a dragon. They’re friends. That’s an unusual friendship. They both like running fast. She added a crayon stripe to what he now understood was the dragon’s tail. Auntie Dana said I could have extra Parmesan.

That sounds like a legitimate agreement. Can I have extra Parmesan? Yes. She went back to her drawing. He watched her for a moment. The concentration in her face, the way her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth when she was working on a detail. The small careful movements of a 7-year-old who took horses and dragons with the same seriousness she gave to everything.

His left arm ached dully under his sleeve. He didn’t move it in a way that would make it obvious. Did you fix lots of things today? Lily asked without looking up. Yeah, he said. A few things. What things? A railing that was loose, a pipe that was leaking. A door that wasn’t working right. Did you fix all of them? All of them.

She nodded, satisfied, as if this was the expected and correct answer. Because in Lily’s understanding of her father’s work, he went in and things were broken and then he fixed them and came home. That was the shape of it, clean and reliable. He was aware sitting at that kitchen table of the distance between the shape of it and the reality of it, not just today, but in general.

The railing that might have given way under a guest’s weight, the caterer who hadn’t been what he appeared to be, the knife on the marble floor, the way the afternoon had hung on a series of things that had to go right, and the number of those things that were nowhere near guaranteed. But also, the railing was fixed now.

The pipe wasn’t leaking. The door worked. And Sophia Blackwell was alive and probably somewhere across the city doing whatever it was that people like her did in the evenings after the kind of day she’d had. And Lily was at the table drawing a horse and a dragon who were friends because they both liked running fast.

Dana put a bowl of pasta in front of him. Rigatoni with something that had been slow cooked long enough to develop opinions and more Parmesan on the side than was strictly necessary. “Eat.” She said. He ate. After dinner, after Lily was bathed and in bed with her current book, she was working through a series about a girl who could talk to animals and she gave him a detailed update every night on what had happened and what she thought was going to happen.

Her predictions delivered with the confidence of someone who trusted her own instincts. He sat in the kitchen while Dana finished her tea. She waited until she heard Lily’s light go off down the hall. “What happened today?” She said. Ethan looked at his water glass. He turned it slightly on the table. “Work thing.” “Ethan?” “It’s nothing.

” “I mean, it’s something, but it’s handled.” She gave him the look, the full one, the one that had been refined over 32 years of knowing him. He told her. Not the full version. Not the version with the four seconds and the knife and the marble floor. He gave her the outline. Enough that she could understand why he looked the way he looked.

When he finished, Dana was quiet for a moment. “You need to ice that arm.” She said. “I know.” “Did you eat enough?” “You watched me eat.” “I watched you move food around a bowl and eat about 60% of it.” She stood up, went to the freezer, brought back a bag of frozen peas and put it on the table in front of him.

“You know exactly what you need to do with that.” He put the frozen peas on his forearm and said nothing. Dana sat back down. She was 51 years old and had his mother’s eyes and a quality of careful honesty that he had always trusted even when it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “You could have let it go.” She said.

“This morning when Callaway blew you off, you could have decided it wasn’t your problem.” “I know.” “But you didn’t.” “No.” She looked at him. “Is that I mean, does that feel like” She stopped searching for the right frame. “Do you miss it? The other work?” He thought about it honestly. “I miss being useful in a particular way.” He said. “I don’t miss the life.

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