"Just checking," Del whispered.
"I know." She slid her hand into his. "Come back to bed."
They stood there a moment longer anyway.
* * *
Arliss Haskell brought over a model airplane on Thanksgiving, a P-51 Mustang he'd built himself and painted silver with a red nose, and he and Kevin hung it from the ceiling of the spare room with fishing line while the turkey rested and Del carved and Janet burned the rolls. Arliss stayed for dinner. He said grace in a soft, rusty voice and then apologized for it, and nobody minded.
After the pumpkin pie, the phone rang, and it was Ray Doyle, calling long-distance from the rehab hospital in Knoxville, and Kevin took the receiver and stretched the yellow cord all the way down the hall to the spare room so he could talk in private, the coils pulled out straight as a clothesline. They could hear his voice through the door, rising and falling, and once, clearly, laughing.
Del dried. Janet washed. Arliss sat at the kitchen table with a cup of decaf and watched them work and said, "You two make a good team," and Janet looked at Del, at his sleeves rolled up and the dish towel over his shoulder, and thought: we used to. We forgot. We're remembering.
"We're getting there," she said.
Ray Doyle came home on the eleventh of December. His brother drove him up from Knoxville in a Ford pickup, and he got out of it in the Doyles' driveway one slow piece at a time, on a pair of aluminum crutches. Kevin was across the street and into his arms before the truck had stopped rocking on its springs, and Ray dropped one of the crutches on the frozen grass and didn't seem to notice, and held on to his son, and Janet watched from the picture window with the curtain pulled back and her hand pressed flat against her chest.
Ray came over that night on his crutches and stood on their front step, filling the doorway, and tried to say something and couldn't, and Del finally just took him by the elbow and brought him inside out of the cold and sat him down at the kitchen table and poured him a cup of coffee. They sat there a long time, the two men. Janet left them to it.
Before he went home, Ray crouched down, carefully, on his bad hip, and held out his big hand to Milo, who was sitting in the kitchen doorway. Milo considered it. Then he walked over and pushed his forehead into Ray's palm.
"Thank you," Ray Doyle said to the cat, very seriously, and nobody laughed.
* * *
On the night after Ray came home, Milo woke her up again.
The weight on her chest. The fish breath. The paw on her mouth, cool and damp. The clock flipped its little plastic numbers. 2:31.
"Mrrp," he said.