Instead, they’d have to talk while breaking down packing boxes in the garage. The boys sat sprawled around the kitchen table inside the house, ostensibly doing homework. She’d just helped Luke turn in seven missing assignments, and she now knew far more than she cared to about igneous rocks,The Outsiders, dividing fractions, and the many tribulations of America’s thirteen original colonies.
Garrett stuffed packing paper into a black trash bag. “Remind me again why we’re doing this when we have four boys inside who are perfectly capable of doing it themselves?”
Garrett always felt the boys should be assigned substantial “chores” like he’d had growing up on a dairy farm. But their children couldn’t do chores around the house because their homework and duties as underage minor-league baseball and hockey players consumed all their time.
“This isn’t the farm, circa 1902.” Kiersten stacked the boxes they’d already broken down into a neat pile. “They have homework to do before school tomorrow. Which is one of the things we need to discuss.”
Garrett looked stoic, resigned to a conversation he didn’t want to have. He’d gotten back from Kansas last night, and the boys had excitedly told him all about Johnny’s left-behind adventure on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. After they climbed into bed, he’d turned to her and asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She hadn’t. “Tomorrow,” she’d said. “We need to talk tomorrow. Without the boys.”
He’d nodded, rolled onto his side, and fallen immediately asleep while she stayed up half the night imagining horrible things thatcouldhave happened at the truck stop, but didn’t.
They’d left the boys inside and retreated to the garage, armed with box cutters and plastic trash bags, ready for their first serious conversation since they’d moved. She realized with a jolt how long it had been since she’d actually talked to her husband about anything deeper than transportation logistics.
She ran the slender blade along the seam of a cardboard box, took a deep breath, and plunged ahead. “So. Yesterday during the crisis, the neighbors came over, and they were really helpful. They’re great people.”
He picked up a wardrobe box, placed it on the concrete floor, and stomped it flat with a whomping sound.
She paused.
He looked over at her. “I’m listening.”
He wore cargo pants and work gloves. Muscles bulged under the sleeves of his gray T-shirt, and his short hair and square jaw made her heart go soft. Still handsome after all these years.
He’d been her high school crush, but they’d run in different circles. He was preoccupied with hockey and cheerleaders, while Kiersten was quieter, preferring to blend in, except on the basketball court, where she stood out.
They didn’t start dating until they ran into each other in the library at Mankato State. He wore a massive white cast over the broken femur that ended his scholarship as well as his hockey career at the University of Minnesota, and he’d transferred to a school closer to home.
Kiersten could not resist when she emerged from a row of illustrated anatomy volumes to find her handsome high school crush struggling to reach a book on an upper shelf from the seat of his wheelchair.
Once they started dating, they fell hard and fast. They got married in the Lutheran church where they’d both been baptized, a giant hometown wedding one month after they’d graduated from college.
Garrett took over the family dairy operation with his dad, and she became a nurse at the small hospital in town, working with the doctor who’d delivered her and Garrett just a couple of decades earlier.
Now as they stood in this garage, a thousand miles from their true home, she felt the distance that had grown up between them over the last few months. It slid around the room like an insidious fog, making her feel like she was embarking on an awkward conversation with a stranger, unsure where or how to begin.
“So you met the neighbors,” he prompted as he slashed the box cutter across a cardboard spine.
“Right. The neighbors. And as it turns out, they’re all having some ... issues at school. Rosamund’s daughter is being bullied. Piper’s daughter is being harassed. They’re all run ragged and never home, like us, which is why this thing on the Turnpike happened in the first place.”
“Okay.” He made no further response as he stacked the carcass of a box on a growing pile of cardboard.
“And Luke is flunking three classes and getting into fights, and Matt hates baseball, and his shoulder is acting up again, and so I was thinking that maybe we should just ...”
She paused.
He stopped what he was doing, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and looked at her. “We should just ...?” He lifted an eyebrow expectantly, waiting for her to finish.
She plunged ahead. “We should just drop out. Of everything. For the rest of the school year.”
Silence filled the garage, broken only by the sound of an acorn dropping on the roof. A deep frown creased his face. “Drop out?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like, go on sabbatical. Take a break. Try an experiment to see if we’re happier and the boys are happier when we aren’t stressed out and running around to seventy-five different activities all the time.”
He rested his hands on his hips. “I see.”
Anger rose inside her like a wisp of smoke from a newly started fire. She needed to smother it, keep it from spreading to her voice, to her limbs. She needed to stay calm. Histrionics never worked with her rational, stoic husband.
