Eli came out of the school building with his soccer bag bumping his knee and a paper crown from some classroom game crushed in one hand. He saw Grant and ran the last few steps the way he still did, as if the world had not yet taught him to ration joy.
"Dad! We made rockets out of straws too, but they're dumb compared to ours."
"Straw rockets have their place," Grant said, taking the soccer bag. "How was the half-day?"
"Short," Eli said, as if this were a profound critique of education. In the car he talked about a kid who had cried at math and a teacher who had let them watch five minutes of a nature video as a bribe. Grant listened with the intensity he usually reserved for weather desks, because listening to Eli was one of the ways he remembered what the job was for.
At a red light Eli asked, "Did your plane do anything cool?"
"It landed," Grant said.
"That's not cool. That's the minimum."
Grant laughed. "Fair. The weather almost made it interesting. Interesting is overrated."
Eli accepted this with a shrug. Children were good at knowing when adults were editing. They were also good at letting the edit stand if the pizza plan remained intact.
***
Gretchen's suitcase came out late, which felt like a metaphor she was too tired to enjoy. She took a rideshare to her house in a subdivision where the lawns were negotiated into sameness. Her husband, Paul, was still at work. The house was quiet in a way that used to feel like peace and now felt like an echo chamber.
She set the patterned handbag on the kitchen island and stood with her hands on the counter. She thought about calling her sister, who loved stories of public comeuppance when the comeuppance belonged to other people. She did not call. She made tea. She sat at the table and wrote, in a notebook she used for work notes, three sentences: