She hates to drive these roads at night—the back country ones that lead to Suzette’s—because they remind her of Luke’s accident. All she can think of was how helpless he must have felt—did he cry out when he swerved? What did he feel as Betsy smashed into that big, solid tree, the tree that still stands? It is odd that Luke will forever be that boy whom time can’t touch. When she pictures him, he’ll always be in that toy store that day. She will spend the rest of her life seeing him like this.
Even when she’s old, even when she and Ahmed have children and grandchildren, Luke will always be somewhere in the back of her mind. She doesn’t know what to do with this, and neither does Ahmed. They never talk about him. Except that one time when he stood in the bedroom of her apartment getting dressed, and she had that faraway stare she would get, and he said to her, tears in his eyes, “Am I enough?” And with that, she snapped out of it. She stood and kissed his forehead, then his lips, and said, “Yes, yes, you are more,” and she meant every word.
She rests her hand on his leg as he drives, and they hear crickets faintly amid the music, and some branches from trees hang low over the car. Ahmed looks at her and lip-synchs to Sinatra, and he rests his left arm on the window. In the distance, when the song is about to change, she can hear someone singing from the bandstand at the carnival, and there is that tug of something in her that thinks of Luke, but only for one second, the way Luke will always ever be there: in flashes, in bits, in the notes of a song.
On the other side of town, hours later, Darcy Crowley has a song in her head and cannot sleep. One her husband used to whistle: “Baby Face.” She keeps replaying it over and over in her head: Ain’t nobody could ever take your place. She wishes she could sleep. She should have left the air-conditioning on, but she thought she detected a nice breeze before bed. Now her bedroom feels stuffy. She hopes Mary Jane and Alvin put the ceiling fan on in Mary Jane’s bedroom. They are staying over tonight with Lizzie （and their standard poodle） because they are having their carpets shampooed. When Mary Jane asked if they could stay, Darcy clapped her hands. “For as long as you want,” she said. Mary Jane was surprised she would allow their dog, but Darcy has surprised herself in the last year. She had the Tylers’ cat here for a while, and she pet its head and changed its litter and even brushed it, so one night with a well-behaved dog is nothing.
Lizzie wanted to sleep with Darcy, which Darcy looked forward to （she imagined whispering back and forth and giggling together and hugging the sleeping Lizzie close to her）， but when Lizzie fell asleep on the living room sofa watching that special on pandas, Mary Jane covered her with a sheet and placed a pillow under her head. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” she said, because Lizzie was a terrible sleeper. Just like her uncle Luke, Darcy thought.
Darcy opens her eyes and takes in the dark room, the nightlight from the hall bathroom sending a reassuring glow. She runs her hand across the summer quilt she switched to in May, the tulips and blue rings stitched carefully into the squares.
As her eyes adjust to the dimness, she sees everything as it should be: the matching crystal lamps on either side of the bed, the tufted bench at the foot, her oak dresser with the carved mirror and the framed pictures of her children on either side. Long ago, she had their senior portraits put into nice frames, and they remain her favorite photographs of them. She loved that time: the world still full of possibilities, she and Von in their prime, each of their parents still alive. Mary Jane with her longer hair then and the strand of pearls around her neck that Darcy insisted she wear, her straight white teeth from those years of braces, her promising smile and sincere brown eyes. And Luke with his sweet smirk of a smile. His white collar and tie. How he shrugged out of that sports coat immediately after the portrait session was done. How he yanked off the tie.
If she looks closely at the picture, she can see those two freckles on Luke’s cheekbone, and now, as she lies in her floral sheets, she wants to flip on her light and look for those freckles. She doesn’t know why. Oh, Luke. My wittle Wuke, she used to say when he’d get hurt, even though he grimaced at her baby talk. She hates when her mind comes back to what she’s lost, and she hears him playing his drums in the basement. She hears him shutting his bedroom door after Von died in that slow, painful way. She sees him that day they put Von’s car in storage, driving behind her, his mouth so hangdog. Now she turns in bed and flaps the sheets to get some breeze.
Tomorrow she is taking Mary Jane and Lizzie to the festival of kites, the day where the retired men who run the kite club encourage all the people in the town to show up, and they help the children fly whatever kites they bring, whether it’s a cheap kite from the five-and-dime or an elaborate box kite. She has bought Lizzie a perfect kite from the toy shop on Walnut Street: a classic red one with a rainbow tail and thick line. She imagines standing behind her granddaughter and watching the kite climb into the sky. “Now you’ve got it,” she’ll say. She imagines Lizzie’s eager eyes as she runs with the spool reel and watches her kite in the air, one of the kind old men nodding or whistling as it takes off.