And then there was a pause on the line, and Margaret said, "Rachel tells me you've made some other arrangements. For Eli."
Laura was standing at the sink. Outside the window over the sink, in the backyard, the hummingbird feeder Eli had hung in April swung gently in the breeze. She looked at it.
"Yes," she said.
"Well. I think that's very sensible of you, Laura."
"He's staying with our neighbor. Mrs. Pruitt. He knows her well. He'll be fine."
"And he understands? He's not too upset?"
"I haven't told him yet." Laura's voice was very even. "I'm going to tell him tonight. I'm going to tell him the house is smaller than we thought and there isn't room for everybody, and next year it'll be his turn."
"Is that wise? Lying to him?"
It was such a strange thing to hear from her mother that Laura laughed, a short, unhappy sound. "What do you want me to tell him, Mom? That his grandmother doesn't want him there?"
"I never said I didn't want him there. I said I wanted a peaceful week. Those are not the same thing."
"They're the same thing to a thirteen-year-old."
"And Mark?" Margaret asked. "What does Mark think of all this?"
Laura closed her eyes.
"Mark doesn't know," she said. "Mark's still in Florida. I'll tell him tomorrow, when we're on the road. I'm going to say Eli got a stomach bug and couldn't travel. By the time he gets to the beach it'll be done, and there's nothing he can do about it from Pensacola anyway, and he'll be upset for a day and then he'll get over it. He always does. That's the whole point, Mom. If Mark knew, he'd never let me do it."
Behind her, very quietly, the door from the garage clicked shut.
Laura turned around.
Her husband was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was still in his work clothes, the heavy canvas pants and the faded orange T-shirt with the power company logo, and he had three days of beard and a sunburn across the back of his neck and a gym bag over one shoulder. In his other hand he was holding a large cardboard box with a bird store's logo on the side. She saw that it had been opened, and taped shut again, as if he had looked inside it on the way home just to make sure.
His face was the worst thing she had ever seen.
It was not angry. Not yet. It was something before angry. It was the face of a man who has walked into his own house and found that it is not his house.
"Laura?" said her mother's voice, tinny and far away, from the phone in her hand. "Laura, are you there?"
"I have to go, Mom," Laura said, and hung up without waiting for an answer.
For a long moment neither of them said anything at all. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the street a lawnmower started up.