Page 12 of My Broken Biker

I go back to the car and sit in it with the engine running and look at Deb's lit-up front window.

I can see two small shapes moving past it, Angela's and Maisie's, and I can hear, very faintly, Angela's laugh from somewhere inside the house. High and delighted.

She's already somewhere else.

I put the car in drive.

The drive home is four minutes and the car is very quiet without her. The booster seat in the back is empty and the air in the car feels different for it, lighter.

Not a sad feeling. Just a real one. The texture of motherhood when your child is happily somewhere else and you're alone in a way you chose rather than inherited.

The house has a different quality when she isn't in it. Not just quiet but genuinely empty in a way you feel in the body.

I move through the kitchen and boil the kettle and while it's going I stand at the counter and look at the six dinosaur drawings on the wall, the row of them, each dinosaur labeled in crayon handwriting with the name spelled three different ways across six drawings.

They look different without her standing underneath them. Just paper. Just crayon in a quiet room.

Tea gets made. I take it to the couch and open the book I've been meaning to finish for a month and read the same paragraph four times without any of it landing, and I close it and set it on the cushion and sit back.

The park is still in my head.

The afternoon under the oaks, the light coming through the leaves in pieces, the gravel path and the bad patch where the root had pushed up through the ground, and then his hand on my elbow, and the half-second after he'd steadied where his hand stayed where it was and neither of us said anything about it for the rest of the walk.

I've been not-thinking about it successfully all evening. Dinner, the shark debate, forty-five minutes of packing negotiations, the car, Deb's doorstep. Angela in the foreground the whole time.

But in the specific empty air of this house with nothing requiring anything from me, the not-thinking stops working.

I think about the elbow. The half-second.

I think about his hands on the coffee shop table the first morning. The size of them. The scarred knuckles.

I set the tea down and look at the ceiling and let myself think about it, because there's nobody here and there's no reason not to.

My phone rings.

I pick it up on the first ring, same as last night, before I've thought about it.

"Hey," I say.

"What are you doing?" he says.

"Nothing," I say. "Just dropped Angela off for a sleepover."

A pause, shorter than most of his pauses. "Come over," he says.

Not a question. The fact of it, put between us plain.

"Okay," I say. I mean it before I've said it.

A beat, and then he says: "I'm glad you're coming."

Which is more than he'd normally say and I know it and he knows I know it.

"Me too," I say.

I put the phone down and sit one more moment in the empty house with the drawings on the wall and the full quiet of it, and then I get up and find my bag and my keys and check the back door and go.

The drive is twenty minutes on the road that runs along the edge of town before the houses start again.