On Friday morning, the day before the state finals, Tom Kessler stood in the doorway of his wife's apartment and watched his younger daughter read the refrigerator.
Rosie was seven and had recently discovered that the world was full of words that had been waiting for her. She read cereal boxes and license plates and the backs of shampoo bottles. She read the warning stickers on the ladder in Tom's truck out loud, with feeling, as if they were poems. Now she stood on her tiptoes in her mother's tiny kitchen with her backpack hanging off one shoulder and her finger moving across the papers held to the freezer door by magnets shaped like strawberries.
"Den-tal clean-ing re-mind-er," she announced. "Pizza. Coupon. Expires." She frowned. "What does expires mean?"
"It means it's too late," Tom said. "Come on, Rosebud. Shoes."
"I have shoes."
"Shoes on the correct feet."
She looked down, considered, and sat on the linoleum to switch them. Lena came out of the bedroom with her hair still wet, carrying Rosie's lunchbox and a hairbrush, and for a second the three of them were in a space no bigger than the cab of his truck, and nobody knew where to put their elbows.
"Morning," Lena said.
"Morning."
It had been seven months since she had packed two suitcases and a laundry basket and moved into this apartment above the pharmacy on Third Street, eleven blocks from the house they had bought when Dani was a baby. Seven months of handoffs. Thursday nights here, Friday mornings to him, alternating weekends, a shared calendar on their phones that Lena had set up and that Tom had never once changed without being asked. They were polite. They were careful. They had become, he sometimes thought, very good coworkers at a job neither of them had applied for.
Lena knelt and began brushing out Rosie's hair. Rosie's hair was the color of wet sand and grew in every direction, and Lena could put it into a French braid in the time it took Tom to find his keys. He had tried, on his weekends. The results had been described by Rosie, kindly, as "a little bit like a rope that fell down."
"So I talked to Dani last night," Lena said, not looking up. Her hands moved, over and under. "I told her I can't make it tomorrow."
Tom thought he had misheard. "Tomorrow."
"I can't be there. I'm sorry. I have to be in Seattle."
"For what?"
"It's a work thing. A course. It's required." She tied off the braid with a purple elastic and patted Rosie's head. "I'll be watching the stream if I can."
"A course," Tom said. "On a Saturday. The day of state finals."
"I know what day it is, Tom."