had said—God help him, he had said—"I'm not in the next room. I'm at work. I'm working for this family." And she'd said, "I know. I know you are. That's what makes it so hard to say."
And then he'd gotten a callout. He actually had. A transformer had blown on the north end and half of Cutler Springs was in the dark. He'd stood up from the step with his phone buzzing in his hand and looked at her, and she'd looked back at him, and she'd said, "Go," and he'd gone. When he came home at three in the morning, the laundry basket was already in her car.
He'd been angry ever since. He knew that, too. He was angry in a low, steady, competent way, like a pilot light. He was angry at her for leaving and angry at himself for letting her and angry at the transformer, of all the stupid things to be angry at. And yesterday in her kitchen she had told him she was going to miss the biggest match of their daughter's life for a continuing-education class, and the pilot light had flared up blue.
He'd been composing things to say to her for twenty-four hours. Things about priorities. Things about showing up. He'd been rehearsing them on the pass with a kind of grim pleasure, and he was a little ashamed of the pleasure, but not ashamed enough to stop.
"Daddy." Rosie's voice from the back, thick with sleep. "Are we there?"
"Not yet. We're on the mountain."
"Is it snowing?"
"A little. Go back to sleep."
She didn't. He heard her rustling around, then the crinkle of a snack bag, then a long silence that meant she was looking out the window at the snow ghosting through the headlights.
"Daddy, is Mama sad she can't come?"
He kept his eyes on the road. "I'm sure she is."
"She was crying in the bathroom on Thursday."
He didn't say anything to that for a long time. The truck crested the summit and the road tilted down toward the west side, toward the wet dark forests and the flat gray light of the coast, and the snow turned to rain on the windshield the way it always did, as if the mountains were a door between two different kinds of weather.
"Was she?" he said finally.
"She said she had something in her eye." Rosie crunched a pretzel. "But it was both eyes."
* * *
The Tacoma Dome looked, at seven-thirty on a rainy February morning, like a giant wooden turtle shell somebody had dropped beside the freeway. Tom had been inside it once, for a monster truck show when he was fifteen. He parked in a lot already crowded with minivans and pickups, many of them painted on the back windows with team names and slogans and numbers, and he looked at his own unadorned truck and thought about the pizza-box sign behind his seat.