You miss it. But when you do hear it, it's not sad. It's just he paused. It's just yours. She thought about that.
That's nice, she said with great certainty, like she'd evaluated the metaphor and found it satisfactory. He breathed. Dad, yeah. Is Clare your girlfriend? He did not drive off the road.
He considered this an achievement. Why are you asking that? Because Jaylen at school says, "When a grown-up always wants to know if someone is coming to things, it means they like them." A pause. You always want to know if Clare is coming to things.
He opened his mouth, closed it. Jallen sounds very perceptive. He's okay, Lily said with the dismissiveness of a seven-year-old who was not currently interested in Jallen. Is she? Were he stopped?
Started again. Clare is a very good friend, Lily. But is she more? He glanced in the rearview mirror. Lily was looking at him with complete directness the way she'd been looking at him since she was old enough to understand that adults sometimes said things that weren't the whole truth.
"I don't know yet," he said honestly, she considered this. "Do you want her to be?" He looked back at the road. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I think I do."
Lily was quiet for exactly 4 seconds. Then good. She remembers which books I like. He almost laughed. Is that the criteria?
It's a good one, she said with complete confidence. And that was apparently the end of the conversation because she went back to telling him about the math test. He drove home with his chest doing something he couldn't entirely account for. That night, after Lily was in bed, he sat at the kitchen table and called his brother in Portland. his brother Greg, who was two years older and had three kids of his own and had been the one steady phone call through all four years of grief and recovery and managed survival. Tell me what's happening, Greg said.
Before Ethan had said anything other than hello. Why do you assume something's happening? Because you called on a Thursday. You're a Sunday caller. Thursday means something happened.
Ethan told him about Friday night. All of it. the bar, the lap, the empty seat, Daniel, the hand on the table. He told it without performing it. Just the facts in order, and Greg listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Ethan had always valued most about his brother. When he finished, Greg was quiet for a moment.