"Getting there," Heidi said. "Are you?"
Cody shrugged, then stopped himself from shrugging as a full answer. "I keep replaying ripping the paper. It felt good for like five seconds. Then it felt like stealing with an audience."
Heidi leaned against the opposite wall. Two people in a narrow hall, learning how to stand near each other without choreography. "I nodded at you. I made it easy to steal. That is on me more than you."
"It's on both of us," Cody said. "I don't want you to take all of it so I can feel clean. I knew."
Heidi reached out and squeezed his shoulder. Cody did not lean in, but he did not pull away. "Thank you for giving it back before Grandpa forced a scene in front of the cousins. You started the repair yourself."
"Grandpa still forced a scene," Cody said, almost smiling.
"Grandpa is allergic to nonsense," Heidi said. "I inherited the allergy and then ignored the symptoms."
They returned to the living room. Frank had his jacket on, keys in hand, the dish towel folded neatly on the counter as a small flag of temporary peace.
"I'll call tomorrow," Frank said. "Not to check whether you have become a saint overnight. Just to hear Charlie talk about the truck's next mountain."
"Call," Heidi said. "And Dad—thank you for coming. I hated it. I needed it."
Frank kissed her forehead the way he had when she was Charlie's age and had broken a neighbor's window with a wild throw. "Hating what you need is a family tradition," he said. "Drive carefully with it."
After he left, the house felt larger and quieter. Heidi and Cody cleaned the last of the cups. They did not talk much. The silence was not empty. It was the silence of people who had used up their hardest words and were letting the ordinary ones rest.
That night Heidi lay awake staring at the ceiling fan's slow blades. She thought about the pull-back car in the closet bag. She thought about writing Charlie's name while planning to erase its meaning. She thought about Frank's old toolbox Christmas and whether memory was a reliable witness or a convenient lawyer. She did not sleep until the balloons in the living room made soft rubber sounds against each other in the dark, like quiet arguments losing steam.
Morning arrived without ceremony. One balloon had sunk to hover at knee height near the bookshelf. Another still clung to the ceiling, stubbornly festive. Charlie woke early, hung his head over the mattress edge to confirm the Thunder Haul's existence, and smiled a private smile into the dust under the bed.
Breakfast was toast and scrambled eggs. Heidi made Charlie's eggs the soft way he liked and Cody's the firmer way he preferred without announcing that she had remembered. Small accuracies felt like a place to start.
"Can we go to the park?" Charlie asked, already negotiating with yolk on his chin. "The truck needs a big hill."