Page 185 of Reeves

"I will."

"Okay." I stand and move back toward the door. “I’m going to turn in.”

“Sleep tight.”

I click the line without responding. It’s best that way.

I stand in the kitchen for a minute with the phone in my hand before I set it on the counter. The house is quiet around me, the way it gets this late.

I think about the school calendar pulled up on his phone, the fact that he looked before he called instead of after. I think aboutthat's your call,and the way he said it, like he meant it all the way down.

Then I turn off the kitchen light and go to bed.

FORTY-THREE

Charli

The Morning After the ProcessionIn New Orleans, the streets are swept clean by morning. The flowers are gone. The crowd has scattered. What remains is the neighborhood, unchanged in its bones, quietly different in every other way.

The pancakes sizzleon the griddle as I flip them, one hand on the spatula, the other checking my watch. Five minutes to get these plated. Six before we need to be out the door. Routine math that runs in the background every morning.

"Mommy. I said I wanted egg in a hole."

"Bud, I told you I don't know how to make those. I promise I'll learn, but it's pancakes today, okay?"

"Okay. I can't find my dinosaur shirt!" His voice carries from his bedroom down the hall. His feet pound against the wood floor as he races back and forth.

"It's in your backpack already. I put it there last night." I slide the spatula under a golden-brown pancake and transfer it to a plate.

Benjy appears in the doorway, backpack dragging behind him like an oversized tail. His hair sticks up in the back, despite my attempts to wet it down earlier.

"Reeves says we might go camping by the lake, so I need my magnifying glass too." He drops his backpack and darts back toward his room. "And my bug book, so we can identify them."

I pour more batter onto the griddle. "You're only going for four days, not four weeks."

This will be the longest time he's been away from me, including the nights he spends with my parents. I'm still coming to terms with it. His excitement about doing things with Reeves literally hums through the house.

Reeves coordinated his time between ending his tour in the Middle East with Benjy's week off from school. They’ve planned a full schedule together that I don't even know about.

"But what if we find something really cool and I can't identify it?" His voice floats down the hallway.

The backpack sits abandoned by the refrigerator. I kneel down and check inside. I make sure his clothes are folded and organized, and the toothbrush is in its case. I add the magnifying glass from the drawer when he reappears with his bug book.

"Got it!" He clutches the book under his arm. "Reeves says there might be giant water bugs. Did you know they can get as big as your hand?"

"Fascinating." I slide the last pancake onto his plate and add a small pool of syrup. "Eat up. We need to leave in ten minutes."

He climbs onto his chair, fork already in hand, but doesn't stop talking. "And Reeves is going to teach me how to build a real shelter, not just a fort. And we're going fishing, and he has a special knife that folds up that he's going to show me how to use, but not touch by myself."

They FaceTime enough now that it’s part of his routine, andhe looks forward to it the same way I used to look forward to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in high school.

Benjy still doesn't know he's his father, since Reeves and I decided we will tell him together in person once he's settled in his new place in New Orleans by Thanksgiving.

Benjy is going to be over the moon when he learns, so that alone makes it all worth it. He will have a father in his life that he adores.

I listen, nodding at appropriate intervals while packing his lunch. Turkey sandwich, apple slices, and cookies from yesterday go into the lunchbox.

"I'm going to miss you," I say, brushing his wild hair back from his forehead. The words come out casually, but they lodge somewhere behind my ribs.