"I didn't forget he was twelve."
"No," Mr. Pryor said gently. "I don't think you did. I think you forgot he was there." He let that sit, and then he added, "Which is different, and fixable. Good luck to your other boy tonight. I mean that. I hear he's very good."
She watched the sedan pull away, the hazards finally clicking off, and stood on the porch until her fingers ached.
When she went back inside, Dante was at the island, hunched over the score sheet. He had laid it flat on a clean dish towel, and he was pressing it with the heel of his hand, slowly, the way you'd press a shirt, trying to get the wrinkle out of the corner where the milk had been. He didn't look up when she came in.
"It's gonna stain," he said. "The milk's in it."
"I know."
"I said that thing." His voice was thick. "About mine mattering more. I said it right to his face."
"I know, baby. So did I. I said it with a lot more words."
He didn't argue. That was how she knew he'd heard it too.
*
Yolanda worked on the fourth floor of St. Agnes Regional, in a room with no windows, where eleven women and two men sat under fluorescent panels and argued with insurance companies on behalf of people who were too sick to argue for themselves. She was the billing coordinator. She was good at it. She could find the one wrong code in a forty-page claim the way some people could find a dropped earring in shag carpet, and she had a reputation, among the insurance reps who knew her voice, as a woman you did not try to put on hold.
That Friday she sat at her desk and opened a denial for a knee replacement and read the first line nine times.
At ten-thirty she gave up and went into the stairwell, where the signal was bad and nobody ever came, and she called her mother.
Mama Ruth answered on the sixth ring, the way she always did, as if the phone were a guest who had arrived unannounced and could wait in the hall. "You're at work," she said instead of hello. "Something's wrong."
"Nothing's wrong."
"You never call me from work."
Yolanda sat down on the concrete step. "Did you know Emmett made state finals for science?"