3. IF DADDY DOES NOT ANSWER, CALL GRANDMA MARJORIE.
4. IF NOBODY ANSWERS, GO NEXT DOOR TO MR. AND MRS. FENSTERMACHER.
5. IF SOMEBODY IS HURT, CALL 911.
6. IT IS NEVER YOUR FAULT.
Below that, in a different hand, his wife's, smaller, in pen: Linnie, you can always do these things and you will never be in trouble for doing them. I promise. Love, Mommy.
He did not understand. Then, all at once, standing in his kitchen on a Thursday evening with coffee grounds on the knees of his work pants, he did. It did not arrive as a thought. It arrived as a kind of cold, the way the air hits you when you step into a walk-in from a hot kitchen, all at once and all over, so that for a second you cannot quite get your breath.
Behind him, his daughter moved. She stepped out of her corner, past him, barefoot on the tile, and put both hands on the handle of the right-hand refrigerator door and pulled. It was a heavy door and she had to lean back on her heels to open it. The light came on inside. The cold rolled out over the floor and over his hands. She did not look at the shelves. She bent down and pulled open the bottom drawer, the crisper drawer on the right, the one they used for vegetables nobody ate, and lifted up a plastic clamshell of baby spinach that had been in there so long it had gone dark and slick, and underneath it, on the white plastic floor of the drawer, lay a ring of keys. Noelle's keys. The Honda fob, the house key, the little brass key to the practice's back door, and the plastic tag from the gym she never went to, and the rubber charm in the shape of a molar that one of the dentists had given her as a joke.
Linnea did not pick them up. She left them where they were. She straightened, and turned, and with one cold hand still holding the drawer open, she pointed with the other at the inside of the door, at the shelf at the bottom where they kept the tall bottles, the orange juice and the oat milk and the ketchup and the seltzer.
Beside the oat milk, in the back, stood a bottle of pinot grigio.
He knew the bottle. He had bought it. He had bought it and three others like it, along with two bottles of a red his brother-in-law liked and a case of Yuengling, for his own birthday party, on a Saturday nineteen days ago, when Hedy and her husband and the kids and four couples from the neighborhood and two guys from the Leola office had stood around in the backyard eating barbecued chicken and pretzel salad off paper plates. Noelle had made a cake. She had stood at the grill in a sundress with a can of lime seltzer in her hand, laughing, and she had seemed, he had thought, completely fine. Completely herself. At the end of the night, with the paper plates in a garbage bag and the kids asleep in a pile on the couch, he had stood with the refrigerator open looking at what was left, the Yuengling and two bottles of white, and he had said, I'll take these to the office Monday, somebody'll drink them. And she had said, from the sink, without turning around, Em, it's fine. Leave them. They don't even register. And he had been tired and a little drunk himself and happy, and he had closed the door.
He had not taken them to the office Monday. He had flown to Baltimore on Tuesday instead.