Page 24 of My Broken Biker

I know before I've finished knowing it.

After dinner Angela gets the encyclopedia and spreads it on the living room rug and I end up on the floor beside her because she wants to show me something.

She traces the diagram with one finger explaining what each part does, and I look at it and I ask one real question about the hollow bones and she answers it from the page and from memory both, and she's warm in the way children are warm when they're explaining something they love to someone who is actually listening.

Harper is on the couch behind us doing something on her phone and I'm aware of her watching without watching.

At eight o'clock Harper closes her phone and says "bath time," and Angela makes the sound Angela presumably makes every night when bath time arrives, which is a kind of protest that doesn't expect to succeed, and then she goes.

I stay on the living room floor with the encyclopedia open on the rug and the sounds of the bath running coming from down the hall and the house doing what houses do in the evening.

I sit on the floor for a while. Then I get up, which takes a moment, and go to the kitchen and find a glass and fill it with water and drink it at the counter and look at the drawings on the wall and the three plates drying in the rack from dinner.

Three plates.

I look at the three plates and something in me is very quiet.

The bath sounds give way to the specific sounds of bedtime, which from out here is Harper's voice and Angela's voice and then Harper's voice alone reading something, and then quiet, and then Harper comes back down the hall and appears in the kitchen doorway.

"She was asleep before the end of the chapter," she says. "Usually takes three."

"Long day," I say.

"Long day," she agrees. She comes to the counter and fills her own glass and stands beside me and looks at the drawings. We stand there in the kitchen with the evening properly dark outside the window now and the house quiet around us.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

I take it out. Knox.

"I need to take this," I say.

She nods. I go to the back door and out into the small yard, which is dark except for the light from the kitchen window falling across the grass.

"Knox," I say.

"Yeah," he says. A pause, the specific kind Knox uses when he's deciding how to start something. "You called me today."

"I did," I say.

"First time in a while," he says.

"I know."

Another pause. Not uncomfortable. Just Knox sitting with something. "You all right?" he says.

"Yeah," I say. "We handled it."

"I know," he says. "I was there."

"I know you were," I say.

The yard is dark and the night has cooled slightly and somewhere down the block a dog is doing something about it. We're quiet on the line for a moment that would have been strange two days ago and doesn't feel strange tonight, which is itself something.

"I was glad you called," Knox says.

I look at the kitchen light on the grass. "I should have called sooner," I say. "For things that weren't this."

Knox doesn't say anything immediately, which is how he handles things that matter to him, and then he says: "Yes." Just that. Not making anything of it, not more than the one word, which is exactly how Knox has always been and which is why we got here, two people who handle things by not making anything of them until there's nothing of them left to make anything of.