Page 18 of My Broken Biker

The kitchen has two mugs in it. I wash mine and put it back in the third cabinet, the right one, and I leave hers where she left it on the counter because I'm not ready to move it yet and I don't examine that beyond noting it.

I sit at the kitchen table where the files usually wait and there are no files today. Just the table and the hard morning light and the specific quality of a house that has recently had someone in it and now doesn't.

Some things that have been avoidable for two years are less avoidable than they were this morning. I know this and I sit with it, and I sit with it clearly, which is something.

Which is more than it was yesterday when I was twenty feet from the truck and reading a man in an alley and had no particular reason to be anything other than what I'd decided I was.

I sit there for a long time.

Then I open the laptop and get to work.

Chapter 6 — Harper

Deb's porch light is still on when I pull up at five past ten, even though the morning is fully bright, which means she forgot to turn it off last night and didn't notice yet, which means she and the girls were probably up later than nine.

I ring the bell and hear the chaos of two six-year-olds being interrupted mid-something, and then feet, and then the door opens and Angela is right there with a piece of toast in her hand and Gerald tucked under her arm and sleep still in her face despite the energy coming off her.

"Mommy," she says. "Biscuit slept between us."

"That sounds like Biscuit," I say.

"He kept moving. He takes up a lot of room for a medium dog."

Deb appears behind her with a mug of coffee and the expression of someone who is functioning on less sleep than she planned for. "They were up till ten-thirty," she says. "I tried."

"I can see that," I say.

"We were telling each other facts," Angela says. "About animals. Did you know butterflies taste with their feet?"

"Maisie told you that?"

"The book told us," she says. "Maisie has a lot of books. Her room has a shelf just for them." She seems to consider this a significant achievement on Maisie's part. "Can I have a shelf just for books?"

I tell her we'll talk about it. She says goodbye to Maisie over Deb's shoulder with the specific intensity of someone parting after a significant shared experience, and Maisie says goodbye back with equal gravity, and we go to the car.

On the drive home Angela gives me the full account of the sleepover, in order, starting with when Maisie's dad ordered the pizza and ending with Biscuit's extended occupation of the sleeping bag situation.

By the time we're home she's starting to run out of steam, which is how sleepovers work, the burn-everything energy of the night spending itself over the morning. She comes inside and drops her bag in the hallway and goes to the couch and lies on it with Gerald and doesn't move for about twenty minutes, which I let happen because she needs it and also because I need the quiet of the kitchen and the coffee I'm making and the specific texture of an ordinary morning after two days that have not been ordinary in any way.

The mug I left on Jace's counter. His hand under my hands in the hallway last night.

I drink my coffee and look at Angela's dinosaur drawings on the wall and I let myself be where I am, which is here, which is good.

Angela recovers around eleven and enters the long unscheduled portion of the day with the energy of a child who has nowhere to be.

She gets the encyclopedia and the crayons and reinstalls herself at the kitchen table where Frank the Stegosaurus and Princess Bucket are apparently mid-adventure, and I put a load of laundry on and do two hours of work at my desk while she narrates things I can half-hear from the other room.

We have lunch at noon, grilled cheese because it's what she asks for, and she tells me more about butterflies and also about a specific type of frog that carries its eggs on its back, which I suspect also came from Maisie's book collection.

I tell her that's remarkable and she agrees that it is.

After lunch I start the chicken for dinner, bone-in thighs in the cast iron with garlic and rosemary, and Angela takes her crayons to the living room rug and works on something flat on the floor on her stomach with her feet in the air, Gerald propped beside her as an audience.

I'm at the counter cutting potatoes when someone knocks at the front door.

Not aggressive, not urgent. Measured and something in me registers it before my brain has finished forming the thought.

I set the knife down.