He went inside. She heard him on the stairs, heard drawers, heard the closet. Her father stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded and watched him go up and watched him come down with a gym bag, and didn't say a word, and Grant didn't look at him. Through the front window Nora saw her mother come out of the house—she must have been in the front room the whole time, in the room that had once been Leo's den—and walk to her silver Camry with the dented rear door, and get in, and sit. Grant stood on the walk with his gym bag for a moment, looking at the Camry. Then he got in his own car and drove away in the other direction.
The Camry stayed in the driveway for twenty minutes. Nora watched it from the couch with her feet up on a pillow and two bandages on her right ankle. Her mother didn't get out and she didn't drive away. She just sat there behind the wheel with her face in her hands.
Then Frank walked out to the car. Nora watched him lean down to the driver's window. She couldn't hear what he said. It wasn't long. Her mother nodded twice, without lifting her face, and started the engine, and backed out, and was gone.
Frank came back inside and sat down in Leo's old recliner across from her. He put his hands on his knees.
"Dad," she said.
"I know."
"Did you know?"
He was quiet a long time. Outside, a lawnmower started up somewhere down the block, the most ordinary sound in the world.
"I knew something," he said finally. "I didn't know what. I didn't know it was—" He stopped. He looked at the floor. "I thought maybe she was going to leave me. I thought maybe there was someone at her work. I thought, if I just leave it alone, if I just give her room—" He made a sound that wasn't a laugh. "Thirty-two years. I'm good at leaving things alone."
* * *
Around six the cramps started.
They weren't bad at first, a tightening low in her belly that came and went, and she told herself it was the stress, it was the heat, it was dehydration. Priya, who had stayed, who had sent her own wife a text that said simply CAN'T COME HOME, EMERGENCY, ALL OK, made her drink a full bottle of water and lie on her left side and time them.
They were nine minutes apart. Then seven. Then six.