In the days that followed, how quiet their house was. He couldn’t say anything to Kay because there was nothing, not one thing, to say. Do you want him back, too? Do you hate the sound of our house, too? Do you wish you had died instead? Do you keep thinking we can’t have dinner because we’re waiting for Benny to come through the back door, head sweaty, clothes smelling like outside the way they always did when he played football? He can see Benny’s fine hair, his clear blue eyes. That scar on his hand from carving the pumpkin when he was seven.
He can go back to that time so easily, because he can pinpoint that it was his worst year. Kay mostly ignored him those days. He remembers how she’d make herself a piece of toast with honey for dinner and stare out the window. He remembers how she just left the loaf of bread on the counter, as if a vague gesture to him. This is what we need to eat to stay alive, even though we have no reason to stay alive. He remembers wanting visitors on those quiet days, but their friends avoided the house.
How did people survive these things? He wondered that all the time. He would go to work, and everyone would nod politely and look down. He would close his office door and put on the AM news station and listen to the traffic report and the weather and sob in his hands.
Some days at lunch, he’d leave his briefcase below his desk and drive and drive. He would let the cold air of late autumn hit his face and pretend Benny was out biking on the road beside him. Alex would keep driving until he escorted him everywhere safely. When a big truck would come by, Alex would give it the middle finger, a gesture he rarely used. He’d pretend to watch his boy cycle beside his car, beside the stretches of field. “Ride in the field,” Alex would say. “Ride where no one can get you.”
Then he’d sit at that family restaurant drinking black coffee and maybe have a cup of soup: pepper pot, beef barley, New England clam chowder. The waitress Melinda was always working, and she started saying, “There’s my guy,” when he walked in. Sometimes she’d touch his shoulder when she brought him the check. Sometimes she would put the coffeepot down and tell him about her day. About her mother who owned the antiques shop in Ohio, about the stray cat she fed. She was in her thirties, and when she smiled, her eyes were almost purple. Like Liz Taylor’s.
One day he said, “Your eyes settle me,” and when she gave him the bill, she drew a small heart by the total.
Driving to her house that first afternoon when her shift ended, following her old Chevy in his polished black Lincoln, he tried to talk himself out of it, but it was exciting. It was the first time he drove that he didn’t imagine Benny biking beside him.
“You sure you want to?” she said, and he nodded.
He went there at least seven times, and she would take off her work clothes as soon as they walked in the door. Once, she convinced him to get in the shower with her, which he and Kay had never done. On his last day there, she poured them each a glass of cranberry juice and put out a plate with Triscuits and cheese. “You know I can’t continue this,” he said.
She sipped her juice and shrugged. “I figured—sooner or later.”
“I shouldn’t have.” He looked down at his glass but couldn’t drink. It was as though he was coming back to life and realizing what was happening. There was no room for her. Because of her, he was saved, and now he had to save Kay. He had to. I got to the shore—some shore. I’m no longer drowning. He had to get Kay there, too. The midwinter sun was reflecting brightly off the February snow outside Melinda’s window, the icicles dripped with a hint of promise, and he wondered for a second why he never saw dishes outside for the stray cat. “Thank you for helping me,” he said. He knew she would know what he meant.
“Don’t mention it.” She crossed her legs and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll see you around,” she said.
He didn’t hear anything from her until Iris was four. When the lawyer came to his office with a file folder and the picture of his child, who looked curly haired and serious in the Kmart portrait with the blue background. “What’s this?” he said, and the lawyer had humorless eyes, as though he were some sick deadbeat pervert. “The mother of your child would like support for the day-to-day care of your child.”
Every time she said your child, he thought she meant Benny, and the dizziness he was feeling from this unexpected news was replaced with a tug of sadness. “Tell her I would have liked to have known about this earlier, but I will meet these support requests.”