"I can live with that," Heidi said. "I am still mad at myself in the same flavor. We can be mad and still make breakfast. Deal?"
"Deal," Cody said. He hesitated, then hugged her—quick, sideways, teenage, real. Heidi hugged back without clinging. Clinging would have turned the hug into a demand for absolution. She let it be a hug.
After the boys were asleep, Heidi opened her closet and took out the bag with the cheap pull-back car. She sat on the closet floor among shoes and held the small toy in her palm. It was fine. It was adequate. It was what she had planned to substitute for wonder. She carried it to the kitchen, placed it in a donation box she kept by the back door for exactly the kinds of almost-right objects that cluttered a life, and closed the lid.
Then she wrote a note on a yellow pad and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a strawberry:
Charlie's things are Charlie's.
Cody's things are Cody's.
Sharing is asked, not taken.
Names mean what they say.
She looked at the note. It was simple enough to seem silly. It was also the kind of silly that might save a morning.
She left it there and went to bed.
Three days later the balloons had all descended. They lay in a colorful, wrinkled colony along the baseboards until Heidi gathered them into a trash bag that sighed when she tied it. Charlie watched the bag go out to the bin and asked if birthdays could come back early if he was very good. Heidi said birthdays kept their own calendars, and being good was not a currency that bought dates. Charlie accepted this with mild disappointment and then asked if the truck could still have birthdays every day. Heidi said the truck could have as many pretend birthdays as Charlie wanted. Charlie parked the Thunder Haul beside his plate at lunch and sang a one-line song to it that had no tune and perfect sincerity.
The sketch markers arrived on Tuesday as promised. Cody spread them across the kitchen table and worked on his bridge poster until the river looked like water and not like a blue accident. Heidi passed behind him once and said the shadow under the span was convincing. Cody said thanks without looking up, which was how he said thanks when it counted. Later he took the poster to Charlie's room and let Charlie add one tiny red dot on the roadway.
"That's the truck," Charlie explained.
"Obviously," Cody said. "I would have known."
Frank called that evening, true to his word, and Charlie gave a full traffic report: ramp rebuilds, pebble injuries, one dramatic crash into a shoe that Charlie insisted was the shoe's fault. Frank listened as if receiving news from a distant province. When Charlie handed the phone to Heidi, Frank did not ask whether she had become better. He asked whether she had read the fridge note aloud to anyone.
"Cody read it," Heidi said. "He said it was corny. Then he said corny was fine."