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Heath: Parking beside the door won’t make your gear dry any faster.

Callahan: It’s eleven steps closer. I counted.

“Car’s ready,” Russ called.

He was standing at the open tailgate with my suitcase already in. When I reached him, he took something out of his coat pocket and handed it to me: a vegetable peeler, still on its cardboard backing.

“For Mark,” he said.

“Where did you get this?”

“Drawer by the stove. We had two. This was the reserve.”

At the gate, I read Anna’s update. Peaches had eaten breakfast, taken her gel, and sat on the fitted sheet in the guest room until Anna made the bed around her. The photograph showed a lump under the comforter with one orange ear showing at the top.

On the plane, I ate the sandwich before we reached cruising altitude and went through my photographs: the frog, the bridge with a marble just leaving the near tower, and Russ bent over the slot-hockey game with his tongue between his teeth. I had several stories for Mark.

I watched Missouri go by under the wing. I’d see Mark in an hour and a half and would need to decide which story to tell first.

The plane landed six minutes early. I rode down the escalator into baggage claim and looked up from my phone to find the carousel number.

Mark was there. He was standing a little apart from the crowd, coat unbuttoned over a navy blue sweater, watching the escalator with his hands in his pockets.

We met beside a family arguing over a stroller. I put my hand flat against the front of his coat and kissed him before either of us could say a word. He smelled of cold air and coffee, and his hand settled at my waist and stayed there.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

“Short-term parking. I got here early. I wanted to meet you inside.”

I kissed him again. “You get two cookies,” I said.

The traffic out of O’Hare was slow. “Good trip?” Mark asked. I gave him a play-by-play of the slot hockey, and he was grinning before I’d finished the first game.

I looked out the window at a flatbed hauling Christmas trees nobody had bought. Next I told him about the marble run bridge.

“When the marble got to the middle,” Mark asked, “did the track sag, or did the towers fold in?”

“They leaned. Josh said that’s not falling.”

“He’s right.”

“If he'd let the marble stay, they would have fallen.” I told him about Josh cheering when the marble made it all the way across and wished that Mark had seen his face. “He used the pencil, by the way. He drew phase two with it. And he wanted to know how you kept the ski-lift chairs from tipping. I didn’t know.”

“Washers. From my dad’s workbench. Two taped under every chair.”

“He would love to talk to you about that in person.”

At the next light, I took the peeler out of my coat pocket and set it on the console.

Mark looked at it, then at me. “What’s this?”

“From Russ.”

“Your brother has never met me.”

“He’s heard about your lack of a carrot peeler.”

Mark picked it up and turned it over. The light changed. The car behind us honked before he put it down.