Marcus kept his eyes on the road. "If I throw him out, he reminds me about February. He doesn't even have to say the number. He looks at the thermostat."
"Then let him look. We can be cold. We have been cold. What we cannot be is a house where Lena has to translate her joy into something small enough for him to step on."
"I'll talk to him after the holidays."
"You said after the furnace. You said after summer. The holidays are a moving hole, Marcus. You keep putting the conversation in it."
He did not answer. The pharmacy's sign turned the wet pavement red and then white. When they got home Lena was asleep on the sofa with the college notebook under her arm like a thing she had decided to accept because refusing it would have required a scene, and she was a girl who had already calculated the cost of scenes. Owen's fifty was in a jelly jar on his dresser. He had written OWEN on a piece of tape and stuck it to the glass. He had not spent it. He liked looking at it. He also, some nights, put the jar in the closet when Lena walked past his door, without fully knowing why the looking felt different if she could see it.
***
The Sunday of the report card began with rain that couldn't decide to be weather.
Denise left at six-thirty in scrubs the color of celery, her hair still damp, a yogurt in one hand and her badge in the other. She kissed Owen on the crown while he was mostly asleep. She paused at Lena's door and Lena, who had been awake, said, "I'm fine," before Denise could ask how she felt about Grandpa coming. Denise stood in the hall a moment longer than the schedule allowed.
"You can show him if you want," she said. "You don't owe him the showing. Those are different sentences. Your dad is home. If it goes sideways, you come get him. You do not manage a grown man by yourself."
"I know."
"Knowing isn't the same as not trying to manage him." Denise touched the doorframe. "I love your grades. I loved them before they were a column of A's. I need you to hear that from me while my shoes are still by the mat."
Lena nodded. She did not trust her voice with the better sentence, the one that would have admitted she wanted Earl to see the paper anyway, that some stubborn part of her still believed this might be the Sunday the column of letters rearranged his face. She hated that part. She also fed it. Both things could live in a thirteen-year-old without her being a fool. She was not a fool. She was loyal to a hope that had not earned her loyalty, which is a family condition more than a personal failing.
After the car pulled away, Marcus made eggs and rehearsed four sentences he did not trust. The money for Owen would stop, or it would be given the same way to both of them. Earl would not talk about Lena's work as if it were a personality problem. If he could not visit on those terms, they would skip a week. The February check was a debt, not a license. In the garage the sentences sounded like a man. In the living room he became a son, which was an older and smaller animal. He meant to say them before Earl sat down. Sitting down was when Earl became furniture.
Owen came to breakfast with his hair flattened on one side and the striped polo on inside out. Marcus fixed the polo. Owen submitted to the fixing with the solemnity of a patient.
"Is Grandpa mad from last time?" Owen asked.