Tonya came down at six in her robe. She worked second shift as a line supervisor at the Harlow Farms processing plant on the bypass, two-thirty to eleven, and she slept late and she woke slow, and she did not like to be talked to before she'd had her coffee. I poured it for her and put it in her hand and she held it under her face for a while.
"Jesse asked to go to Luke's race," I said.
She looked at me over the cup.
"I said he can't leave practice early. Not the first week."
"Mm," she said.
"Luke said it was fine. He said it's just sectionals."
"Mm," she said again. She set the cup down. Tonya and I had been married twenty years in June, and I had learned that she had about forty different ways of saying mm, and that this one was the kind that meant she was going to say something later, after she'd decided whether it was worth it.
"You can't go either," I said. "You're working."
"I know I'm working, Roy."
"I'm just saying. It's not like he's going to be up there with nobody. Coach Ogletree's there. His team's there."
"I know who's there." She picked the cup back up. "Did you look at the paper Sunday?"
"What paper."