At 10:27, it went off. Calvin listened to the quiet house next door and thought, "They made it through the first night." In his experience, that meant more than people knew. He slept. And in the morning when he went to get the newspaper from the end of the driveway, Robert Hayes was on his porch with his coffee.
Calvin raised a hand, Robert raised his. They looked at each other across the yards. Two men who didn't need to say much to understand each other. Robert looked tired. He looked like he'd been awake most of the night.
He looked like a man who'd been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had just for the first time admitted the weight of it. But his shoulders were different. Slightly, almost imperceptibly, his shoulders were different, like something had finally been put down. Calvin picked up his newspaper and went inside. 3 days passed.
Calvin told himself he wasn't keeping track, but he noticed things the way you notice things when you live next door to someone. The way sound travels between houses, when the windows are cracked, the way a driveway tells you more than a conversation sometimes. Robert's car hadn't moved. Sophie's suitcase, which he'd spotted briefly through the open front door the morning she'd stepped out to talk to him, was still there. She was still in that house.
He didn't know what to make of it. He didn't try to. On the fourth morning, a Thursday, he was loading his work bag into the truck when he heard footsteps behind him on the driveway. Quick, purposeful, the kind that meant someone had something to say and had made up their mind to say it. He turned around.
Sophie was crossing the yard with two mugs of coffee. She was wearing the same oversized sweater from before and a pair of worn canvas sneakers and her hair was loose around her shoulders. She moved like someone who had been up for hours. She held out one of the mugs. You take it black, right?
He blinked. How'd you know that? Dad told me. She kept the mug extended until he took it. He tells me everything about you.
Nothing about himself, but everything about you. He took the coffee. It was hot, freshly made. Thank you. Don't thank me yet.
She wrapped both hands around her own mug and looked at him with the kind of directness that caught him slightly off guard, the way her directness always did. Can I talk to you before you leave? Calvin checked the time. He had 20 minutes. Yeah.
She nodded. She didn't rush into it. She looked at the street for a moment. The bare trees, the pale October sky. Then she said, "We had another one last night.
Another argument worse than the first one." She took a slow breath. I brought up my mother. Calvin said nothing. He waited.
I told him that after she died, when I was in college, I needed him to say the one thing, just one thing that would have made me feel like he wanted me to come home, that he missed me, that the house was empty without me. She shook her head. You know what he said? What? He said, I paid your tuition every semester.