Elsie nodded and went to her room. Carly stayed on the toilet lid with her hands in her lap, looking at the box, while Finn splashed and sang a song about a shark, and I stood in the hallway and watched her not move.
We talked that night after the kids were asleep, at the kitchen table, with the window open and the foghorn going down at the harbor entrance every thirty seconds the way it does when the lake breathes out. I'd thought it would be a fight. It wasn't, quite. Carly was too tired to fight and I was too sure. I told her I was calling the company on Monday and taking a leave, and that after the leave I was going to look for work ashore, at the shipyard across the bay in Superior or the power plant or anywhere that would let me sleep in my own house. I told her we'd have less money. She said she knew. I told her I'd already made an appointment for Elsie with the eye doctor on Tuesday, and that I was going to be the one to take her, and that I wanted Mrs. Fjelstad's email address and the counselor's, and that every note that came home from school from now on was going to come to both of us. I told her I'd found a family therapist in Hermantown who took our insurance and had an opening in two weeks.
"You've been busy," she said.
"I was on the back steps for an hour."
She turned her coffee cup around and around on the table. "Are you going to leave me?" she said. "Is that what this is? You're going to take her."
"No," I said. And then, because I'd decided I was done saying the easy thing: "I don't know, Carly. I don't think so. I'm not trying to take anybody anywhere. I'm going to be here, and I'm going to see what happens, and I'm not going to stop looking. That's all I know tonight."
She nodded slowly. It wasn't an answer either of us liked. It was the true one.
"She bought him a cupcake," Carly said after a while. "With your money. She stood there and picked one out for him." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "After what I did to her this morning. She went and got him the kind he likes."