She laughed and kissed him on the cheek, and said, “Go home. Stella’s eating cereal for dinner and you know it. Take her some chicken.”
“She’s definitely eating cereal for dinner.”
“Go.”
Stella’s light was on. He could see it from the driveway. He sat in the truck for a minute with the engine off and the windshield going dark.
He went inside. Stella was at the kitchen counter with a bowl of cereal at nine-forty-five, which was not a dinner, and she looked up at him when he came in and saw his face and didn’t say anything.
“Good dinner?” she asked.
“Good dinner.”
“You don’t smell like wine.”
“I didn’t have much. But I did bring you some chicken, from Lindsey.”
He dropped his keys on the counter and sat on the stool next to hers.
“Nice. I’ll trade, no problem.”
She opened the container and reached for a fork. She pushed the cereal box over. He took a handful and ate it dry.
“Dad. You okay?”
He thought about it for a while before answering.
“I will be,” he said.
Stella nodded. She didn’t ask anything else. They sat at the counter in the quiet kitchen and she ate and he ate his dry handful, and the fridge hummed and the pipes ticked in the wall. After a while Stella got up, rinsed her bowl, put it in the drying rack, kissed the top of his head on her way past, and went down the hall to her room.
He got his phone out of his jacket pocket and set it on the counter in front of him.
Tomorrow, he thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The party had run late—twenty people for a fortieth birthday, three toasts too many. By ten-fifteen the kitchen looked like it always looked after a four-course menu, and three half-empty bottles of red sat on the pass that the guests had forgotten to take with them.
Anna had gone straight to washing dishes. The water was as hot as her hands could stand. She had her sleeves up and Margo’s old apron on.
Tyler at the grill, scraping. He’d been quiet all night.
Meg in the dining room, breaking down. She’d put the chairs up on four tables and was working her way toward the windows with the broom. Luke had gone home an hour ago, kissing Meg at the door the way he did, like he was leaving for a month instead of a night. The lights over the booth were off. The lights over the bar were off. Just the pendants over the pass and the small lamp Joey had installed last year in the corner because he’d said the room needed a “soft place to put things down.”
Anna liked the Shack at this hour. The room without people in it. The light low. The smell of the night’s food still lingering. The ocean through the open windows, louder now that everyone had gone.
She pulled the last bottle of red off the pass. About a third left. She got three of the rocks glasses they used for the late-night cleanup wine because nobody felt like washing wineglasses at this hour, poured and set them on the four-top closest to the kitchen.
“Come and sit for a minute,” she said to her brother and sister.
Meg leaned the broom against the wall and sat. Tyler set the grill scraper down, wiped his hands on the towel, and came over. He reached for his glass but didn’t drink.
“Good party,” Meg said.
Anna nodded and took a sip.
Nobody said anything for a while. The pendant over the pass made a small humming noise it had been making that Joey had a theory about. Tyler leaned back and closed his eyes. Meg pulled her sleeves over her hands and wrapped them around her glass. Anna looked at the booth—empty, the way it had been every evening since Bernie’s surgery—and then at her brother and her sister sitting at a table in a restaurant their grandmother had built, and she thought about how tired she was and how she didn’t want to go home yet and how none of them were going to say the thing until somebody actually did.
