He looked at it for a second. Noelle was a punctuation person. She was a dental hygienist and she wrote texts the way she wrote chart notes, with periods and commas and the occasional semicolon, and she teased him for his double exclamation points. But it was Thursday, and Thursday was swim, and swim was at four-fifteen at the rec center on Maple Street, and she would be standing in the warm chlorine fog of the observation room with her phone in one hand and Linnea's towel over her arm, half watching, half answering patients' mothers about appointment times. He put the phone in his shirt pocket and stood when the seatbelt light chimed off, and banged his head on the overhead bin, and forgot about it.
That was the first thing. He would come back to it later, many times, the way you come back to a step you missed on a staircase in the dark. Four notifications, and he had looked at all four of them, and he had decided what they were without opening a single one.
He was thirty-eight years old. For eleven years he had been a sales engineer for a company in Leola that built commercial refrigeration, walk-in coolers and reach-in freezers and display cases and the big insulated boxes in the backs of restaurants where line cooks go to stand for thirty seconds when the kitchen gets to be too much. He knew more about keeping things cold than anyone he had ever met who wasn't also in the business. He could stand in a hospital kitchen in Wilmington or a seafood place in Annapolis and listen for ten seconds and tell the owner why his compressor was short-cycling. It was the only thing he had ever been truly good at, apart from, he liked to think, being Linnie's father, and in August the company had rewarded him for the first thing by making him regional manager for the Mid-Atlantic, which meant more money and a better title and a territory that ran from Scranton down to Norfolk. It also meant Tuesday through Thursday on the road, every week, in rental cars and airport hotels, eating dinner at the bar of an Applebee's in Fredericksburg with the game on.
They had talked about it, he and Noelle. They had sat at the kitchen table in July after Linnie was asleep with the offer letter between them and a legal pad, and Noelle had drawn a line down the middle of the pad and written PROS on one side and CONS on the other, and the PROS had been longer. She had been the one to say it. Take it, Em. We'll figure it out. Linnie's on the bus now. I'm done at two on Thursdays. My mom's twenty minutes away. We'll figure it out.
He had asked her, once, carefully, the question underneath the question. He had said, Are you sure you'll be okay with me gone that much? And she had looked at him across the table with an expression he could not, even now, entirely read, and said, Emery. It's been two years. I'm okay.
It had been two years and change then. It was more now. He knew the exact number, or thought he did, because it was written on the refrigerator door every morning in his wife's handwriting.
The drive from the airport took fifty minutes if you went down 283 and cut across on 772, and he went that way because it was prettier, because the light was going long and gold across the fields east of Manheim, because the corn had been cut and the stubble stood in pale rows and a man in a straw hat was driving four mules in a line across a hill with a manure spreader rattling behind them. Lancaster County in October. He had stopped seeing it years ago and started seeing it again in August, when he began leaving it every week. He had the radio on low. He had the snow globe on the passenger seat, rolling a little on the curves. It was a cheap little brick lighthouse in a dome of water and glitter, and it had nothing to do with Richmond, but Linnea collected them, and she had nine, and she kept them in a row on her windowsill in order of how much she loved them, which changed weekly.
He did not listen to the voice messages in the car. He thought of them once, outside Rothsville, and then a tractor pulled out of a farm lane in front of him, and after that he was thinking about the tractor.
Lititz is the kind of town that shows up on lists. Coolest Small Towns in America. Best Main Streets. There's a chocolate factory at one end of Main Street, so that on warm days the whole downtown smells faintly of cocoa, and a pretzel bakery that's been twisting pretzels since 1861. The Brenneckes lived four blocks off Main on Locust Street, in a brick half of a double house with a green porch and a square of front yard that Emery mowed with a push mower because it took nine minutes. Their side had the porch swing. The Fenstermachers' side had the wind chimes. Mr. Fenstermacher was eighty-one and had carried the mail in Lititz for forty years, and Mrs. Fenstermacher made shoofly pie for the whole street every Fourth of July.
He pulled into the alley behind the house at five thirty-one. The garage door was closed. Noelle's car, a gray Honda CR-V with a rear bumper sticker that said I BRAKE FOR SOFT PRETZELS, was parked on the concrete pad in front of it, nose in, where it always was.
He noticed that. He noticed it in the way you notice a thing that is ordinary and should not be. It was five thirty-one on a Thursday. Swim got out at five. By five thirty-one the CR-V was usually still on Maple Street, or idling at the drive-through at Rita's if it was hot, or just pulling into the alley with Linnea in the back seat, her hair wet and her goggles still on her forehead, singing. But it was here. The hood, when he walked past it with his roller bag and laid his palm on it out of an old habit of his father's, was cold.