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Chapter Forty
Katie lifted the next-to-last piece of the shrine off the living room wall. His kindergarten diploma. Across the top, a row of crayon children held hands like paper dolls, and she imagined Mrs. Owens choosing the frame. Hammering in the nail.
Pointless tears welled up in her eyes, and she lifted one hand to dismiss them and lost her grip on the frame. It slipped from her fingers. The corner stabbed into the top of her foot before flopping over onto the carpeted floor.
“Mother fucker!” Katie lifted her injured foot to cradle it in her hands. She lost her balance, hopped a few times, and came down on her butt, her fall cushioned by the scraping of her back against the edge of the couch. A stacked tower of books slid to the floor.
“What was that?” Sean called from the attic.
“I’m all right,” she said, but she was too out of breath to shout properly, and his feet were already pounding down the stairs. He burst into the room as if he expected to find her dead, and she looked down at her foot, sort of hoping the injury would be terrible.
No such luck. A white-edged scrape, some toothed skin, an anemic welling of blood. If she’d been wearing shoes like a sensible person, she wouldn’t even have the blood to show off.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I just dropped a picture frame on my foot. Sorry if I scared you.”
Sean looked at the wall in front of her. Only a grade school portrait remained, abandoned among rectilinear areas of darker paint that hadn’t faded over the years. A ghost shrine.
“You p-p-packed it up.”
“I thought it was time.”
He dropped to the floor next to her, his head lowered so she couldn’t see his expression. “Luh-let m-me ssseee yuh-your ffoot.”
She didn’t need to glimpse his expression, not when that telltale thickening of his stutter spoke volumes. He had to hate it—not just the sound of his own voice, but the way it tipped his hand whenever he felt vulnerable or threatened.
He’d been tipping his hand a lot since they started packing up the house four days ago. They’d begun in the attic. Katie wore old jeans and brought along her dad’s ancient portable radio, guessing correctly that Sean would want to work without talking and without a lot of fuss.
He attacked the house with brutal efficiency. They’d been putting in long, dirty hours, stopping only to eat. He’d had a Dumpster delivered, and they both made endless trips up and down the stairs, carrying boxes of stuff he’d decided was trash. When the rain started coming down late this morning, she’d stopped taking boxes outside, but Sean hadn’t. She set them by the door now, and he carried them out, sometimes doubling up in a way that made his biceps flex and the cords in his neck stand out.
In the garage, he’d shown her a tarp where they put the things he wanted to keep, but so far the pile was pitiably small. A few of his mother’s dishes and her Riverside Shakespeare. A box of things from her closet marked “William,” which he said was his father’s name. The unframed Star Wars posters, rolled up and secured with rubber bands.
He had very little to say to her, but when he spoke, he stuttered so badly that one time he’d punched a wall in frustration and stalked out of the room.
“I m-m-might have thrown out the B-b-b-band-Aids.” His thumb traced a line across the arch of her foot and pressed into the ball.
“I don’t need a Band-Aid.”
He looked down at his hand and set her foot on the floor, and she missed his touch immediately. He’d stopped touching her after they returned from Pella. Katie guessed he’d decided they were finished having sex.
Too risky.
“P-p-p-put on yuh-your sh-shoes,” he ordered. “Yuh-you c-c-could sssstep on sssomething.”
“All right.”
He turned to leave the room, somehow managing not to look at the empty wall, the box on the floor, or her. So skilled at navigating minefields, her guy.
“Sean?” she asked before he made it out the door.
“Wuh-what?”
“What do you want me to do with the box?”
“Throw it awuh-way.”
She listened to the hollow thumping of his feet on the treads as he made his way back up to the attic, where he was sorting through and discarding 99.9 percent of his childhood. She’d watched him walk by with boxes that contained clothes, books, gaming systems, yearbooks. All of it headed outside.
