“It’s late there.”
“Late-ish.”
She let him have that. Through the phone he could hear a television at low volume, a faucet, the sounds of a house with lights on.
“The garden’s done for the year,” she said. “Mom put the last of the tomatoes up before the frost. She’s claiming three hundred jars of sauce.” A pause. “She will not get three hundred jars. She’ll get forty, give half away, and tell everyone she canned three hundred.”
Milo moved to the window. “She gave me twelve last summer. I have eleven.”
“Which ones.”
“Tomato.”
“Which tomato.”
“The one with a sun on it.”
She laughed, the quick version, the one that arrived before she decided to. “That’s the basic marinara. She sends everyone the basic marinara. You were supposed to get the arrabbiata. She must have mixed up the boxes.”
He stood at the window. The city below, orange streetlights on wet pavement, each one reflected in the water like a coin pressed into glass. A bus through the intersection, brake lights flaring and releasing. Fourteen floors between his palm and the street. He pressed his hand flat against the glass. Cold.
“Dad replaced the porch board,” she said. “The one he’s been meaning to fix since spring. Measured twice, cut once, it was wrong. We don’t talk about it.”
“How wrong.”
“Wrong enough that you feel it when you step on it. But he put a rug over it.” The same easy register, but something underneath leaning on the words. “What you can’t see isn’t your problem. That’s the philosophy.”
The refrigerator hummed. Milo looked at his palm against the glass, the orange light coming through around his fingers.
“Are you happy?” he said.
He hadn’t planned to say that.
She didn’t answer right away. Through the phone the television went silent. She’d muted it.
“Yeah,” she said. “Mostly.” A pause. “You?”
His chest tightened and climbed, pulling from his ribs up through his throat. He pressed his hand harder against the glass.
“Fine,” he said.
The word sat between them. Her breathing through the phone, patient.
His father had said something once. One sentence, one dinner, Milo home from juniors. The kitchen table with the overhead light that made everyone look tired. His father’s hands around a beer, scarred knuckles, the nail on the left index finger permanently blackened from a millwright’s accident.That’s a hard life to choose.Not even looking at Milo when he said it. Looking at his plate. And then the silence that filled the kitchen and the house and the next twelve years.
She was quiet. Then, gently: “Okay.” The word a door held open, not walked through. “You know you can call.”
“I know.”
“Even if it’s just to complain about the marinara.”
His hand came off the glass. The cold lingered in his palm. “I’ll call about the marinara.”
“You better.” A pause that lasted longer than it needed to. “Get some sleep.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She hung up.
