The Party He Threw After Our Son Left (Marriage In Crisis #31)

Chapter 1

COLLEEN

At twenty of six in the morning I was at the kitchen counter labeling the last bin with a marker that's lived in the junk drawer since Meg's sophomore year.

OWEN BAKER. Then, because I can't help myself, under it: SHEETS/TOWELS/EXTRA BLANKET.

The blanket was the gray one out of the hall closet, which he hadn't asked for.

He'd asked for a mini fridge, a shower caddy, one of those mattress pads that claims it can fix a bad mattress.

Nobody asks for a blanket at eighteen. Eighteen doesn't believe in cold any more than it believes in sunscreen or leaving a half hour early.

I put it in anyway. Taped the lid.

Hank came down at six with his hair still wet, smelling like the soap he's used since 1998, dressed for lifting — old jeans, the green shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder seam. I've thrown that shirt away twice. It's come back twice, like a cat.

"Truck's loaded except the fridge." He looked at the bin, then at my handwriting. "Name tapes. Like camp."

"He'll lose it otherwise."

"He's not going to lose a bin, Coll."

"He lost a trombone."

That got him. He laughed into his coffee, low, the way he does, which after twenty-six years still gets me somewhere. "He did lose a trombone," he said. "In a building. That the trombone lived in."

Owen came down at six-fifteen in the shirt he'd slept in, hair flat on one side, carrying his pillow under his arm the same way he carried it out to the car when he was four.

He ate two bowls of cereal standing up, put the bowl in the sink instead of the dishwasher, and I let it go, because I'd decided in the shower that I wasn't going to spend the last morning correcting him.

That was the phrase I'd handed myself. The last morning. I heard how it sounded even while I was thinking it. Nobody had died. He was going two hours up the interstate to a school we picked together, that we could mostly afford, in a state where his sister already lives.

Still. It was the last morning of something.

I checked the medication drawer twice before we left — not his, ours.

Hank's blood pressure pills, my thyroid, the ibuprofen, the box of Band-Aids nobody's touched since the kids stopped falling off things.

What I wanted was the Zyrtec, because Owen gets hay fever in September and won't think about it until his eyes swell shut.

I found it behind the cough syrup and put it in my purse.

Then I stood there with my hand on the drawer, listening.

The refrigerator was running. Upstairs the shower had already quit.

The floor over the kitchen creaked twice, which meant he was crossing his room, which meant he was picking things up off the carpet and putting them in his backpack in no particular order.

Down the hall the screen door banged, because Hank never catches it.

I was cataloguing. It felt like packing myself a lunch.

We left at seven. Owen sat in back with his headphones in, one ear out, answering questions the way he answers questions, which is with about sixty percent of a sentence.

Hank drove. The tarp over the truck bed made a low flutter the whole way, since it had rained Thursday, a sound like something breathing.

We stopped once, at the plaza past the reservoir, because Hank can't get through two hours without a coffee he doesn't finish.

Owen bought a bag of those chocolate donuts and ate four of them in the parking lot while his father put air in a tire that didn't need it.

Neither of them said a word the whole time.

They stood out there in the sun about a foot apart, one chewing, one watching a gauge, perfectly happy.

Around mile eighty Owen pulled both earbuds out and asked if his roommate would already be there.

"Probably. Move-in started at eight."

"What if he's weird."

"You're weird."

"That's what I'm saying," he said. "Two weirds is a lot for one room."

Hank caught my eye in the mirror. Neither of us said anything.

The campus was a circus. Orange cones, kids in matching shirts with clipboards, a woman working a bullhorn to steer minivans onto the loop road.

A boy in shorts and rain boots went by carrying a full-size floor lamp over his head like a spear.

Somebody's grandmother had set up a folding chair in the middle of a lawn with a small dog on her lap.

A girl in an orange shirt wrote 9:12 on our windshield in grease pencil and told us we had until 9:42 before they towed the truck.

My husband is excellent in a driveway. He backed that thing into a space no bigger than itself, then got the fridge up two flights on his own back with a strap, and he did it without turning the strap into a story about how hard it was.

He shook the roommate's father's hand, asked the boy where he was from, remembered it, used it again ten minutes later.

I made the bed. Mattress pad, sheets, gray blanket folded at the foot, his pillow at the head in the good pillowcase, the one with the little tear in the seam he's never once noticed.

The Zyrtec went in the top desk drawer along with Band-Aids, a pack of index cards, a handful of granola bars.

Nineteen years of keeping a granola drawer at a school and my hands do it now without asking me.

The roommate's mother came in while I was doing it, carrying a shoe rack still in the box, and we did the thing two women do in that situation.

She said the drive up was terrible. I said ours was fine.

She asked what mine was studying, and I said he wasn't sure yet, which she took better than most people do.

"Mine's undeclared too," she said. "I've stopped saying it like an apology."

I liked her. I'll never see her again.

Then the room was finished, and I was standing in the middle of it with my keys.

Owen was talking to the roommate about some game. Already halfway into a life I'd only ever get in summaries.

"Hey," I said.

He turned around. Seven inches taller than me. Hank's shoulders, my mother's chin, his own terrible posture.

"Text me when you find your classes. Not tonight. Sometime."

"Okay."

"Take the allergy stuff before it's bad, not after."

"Okay, Mom."

"There's a blanket."

"I saw the blanket."

Then he hugged me, and he did it first, which I hadn't braced for. He still smelled like our laundry soap. In three weeks he'd smell like some other soap from some other store, picked out by him.

"You're good," he said into my hair, which is a thing he says, which means stop.

"I'm good."

Hank hugged him hard, pounded him twice on the back, said something in his ear I didn't catch. Then we went down two flights into the late-August heat, got in the truck, drove away from him.

I didn't cry on the loop road. I made it all the way to the highway before it got me, and even then it was only a minute of it, mostly in my throat, my face turned to the window. Hank reached over and left his hand on my knee a while, which was exactly right.

Twenty miles later he started whistling.

It took me most of a mile to place what I was hearing, because my husband doesn't whistle. He hums sometimes when he's measuring. This was the real thing, full and tuneful, some song I could almost name, going on for four or five miles.

"You're chipper," I said.

"Am I?"

"You're whistling."

"Huh." He shifted his hands on the wheel, smiling at the road. Not smiling about anything. Just wearing it. "Guess I am."

I watched him a while. His shoulders were down. He had one wrist hooked over the top of the wheel, the way he drives on vacation.

"You okay?"

"Better than okay." He glanced over. "Hey — let's not go straight back. Let's stop somewhere. Real dinner. That place with the fish tacos, off the exit with the water tower."

"That's an hour out of the way."

"So?"

"I've got a truck full of empty bins."

"The bins can wait in the truck, Coll. They're bins."

I said no. I wanted the rooms. Some stupid animal part of me had decided that if I got home fast enough the day might still be reversible.

He took it fine. Put the radio on, drummed two fingers on the wheel at every light once we came off the interstate, made a joke about the neighbor's flagpole. Somewhere in there he said, out of nowhere, "Two hours isn't far. That's nothing. That's a Saturday."

"It's not far," I agreed.

We pulled in at six-forty. The porch light was on because I'd left it on that morning out of habit, for a boy who wasn't coming home.

Hank carried the bins into the garage. I went in through the kitchen, set my purse on the counter, stood still.

The house wasn't doing anything. The refrigerator hummed, then cycled off, into a quiet with no floor under it. No shower. No bass through the ceiling. No door. Nobody yelling from another room to ask where a thing was that had never once been where he was looking.

Twenty-four years of noise, gone up the interstate in a truck.

I heard him come in behind me and drop his keys in the bowl. Then he took a long breath in through his nose, the way he does at the end of a job, when the tools are loaded, when the floor's down, when the client has paid.

"Well," he said. "Here we are."

He said it warmly.

I stood with my back to him at the counter, and it went in crooked, the way a stair does when it isn't where your foot expects it.

"Yeah," I said. "Here we are."

He came past me to the refrigerator, hung on the open door the way he does, took out the sandwich meat, put it back.

"There's nothing in here."

"I'll go tomorrow."

"I'll go with you." He shut the door. "Nothing's stopping us now."

I ran the tap over a glass I'd already washed.