"I'll think about it," Laura said, and hung up, and sat in the van for a long time with her hands on the wheel.
She did think about it. That was the terrible part. She thought about it for three days, and the more she thought about it, the more it began to seem not like a betrayal but like a solution. Like a kindness, even.
She made a list in her head, the way Eli made lists in his notebooks. Reasons. One: Eli hated long car rides, and it was nine hours from Dayton to Nags Head. Two: he hated new places, hated strange beds, hated the smell of other people's soap. Three: there would be fourteen people in the house, and the Brandt children were loud, and her mother was watchful, and every meal would be a field of land mines. Four: if something happened, if he broke something, if he screamed, if he ran, she would have to deal with it alone for the first full day, because Mark would not be there until Sunday night. Five: her mother was turning seventy. Her mother had asked. Her mother, who had never once in Laura's life told her she had done something right, had asked for one peaceful week.
Six. She did not let herself think about six. Six was the thing underneath all the other things. Six was that for one week, just one, Laura wanted to sit on a beach and drink a glass of wine and not watch her son's shoulders for the first sign of a storm. She wanted her mother to look at her across a dinner table the way she looked at Rachel. She wanted, for seven days, to be the daughter who had the easy family.
It was the most shameful thing she had ever wanted. She wanted it anyway.
On Friday afternoon she walked across the street to Dolores Pruitt's house.
Mrs. Pruitt was seventy-six and had lived across from the Delgados since before they moved in. She was a retired school nurse, widowed for nine years, with a vegetable garden she defended against rabbits like a general and a bird feeder in her front yard that was the reason Eli had started watching birds in the first place. When he was eight, he had stood at the end of her driveway for forty-five minutes watching a cardinal, and Mrs. Pruitt had come out with a field guide and a glass of lemonade and sat down on her front steps and started teaching him the names. They had been friends ever since. Eli went over there most Saturdays to help her fill the feeders. She was one of the very few adults in the world he did not seem to find exhausting.
"He'd stay with you," Laura said. They were sitting on the porch swing on Mrs. Pruitt's front porch. "For the week. I'd pay you, of course. He already knows the house. He knows your routines. He wouldn't be in a strange place, he wouldn't have to sit in a car for nine hours, he wouldn't have to deal with my mother. He could just watch the birds and help you in the garden. It would be so much easier for him."