Three days. That’s how long it took for Violet to speak to me after I walked back into our home. Sam had been dead for nearly seven months by then. She started at Neptune and I worked on Jupiter. Eventually we met somewhere near the sun.

“Why did you leave?”

“I needed to feel better.”

I passed her the piece she was looking for.

“I missed you while I was gone,” I said.

She punched in the piece and looked up at me. People always told me she looked older than her age, and I didn’t see it until then. The color in her eyes looked darker to me. Everywhere I looked in the house, everything was different. Everything had changed. I looked away from her first. Bile filled the space under my tongue. She watched me swallow. And swallow again. I excused myself to the bathroom.

The puzzle was put away when I came back. I found her in her bedroom reading a book. She had no doubt heard me retching into the toilet.

“Do you want me to read that to you?”

She shook her head.

“My stomach’s a bit upset. From dinner. You feel okay?”

She nodded. I sat at the end of the bed.

“Do you want to talk about anything?”

“I want you to leave again.”

“Your room?”

“Leave us. Me and Dad.”

“Violet.”

She turned the page.

My eyes welled. I hated her. I wanted him back so badly.

50

After my mother left us, my father continued as if nothing had happened. Logistically this wasn’t difficult—she’d become less and less a part of our routine as the years had passed, a casual observer of us, like she was watching a movie she might turn off before the ending.

The only thing that changed was that he moved my toothbrush and my hairbrush to the top drawer in the bathroom, which was stained with years of makeup and tacky hair products that had leaked from her aerosol cans. That I no longer kept my things under the sink made me feel like I had new responsibilities now, although I didn’t know what they were.

My father began to have friends over to play poker on Friday nights. I would go to Mrs. Ellington’s and stay there with Thomas, watching movies and eating popcorn, until she turned off the television and offered to walk me home, where I’d go straight to bed. But one night I lingered in the dark hallway outside the kitchen and listened. The house smelled of musky cologne and beer.

I didn’t mind those nights, the house full of men and their smells—it was one of the only times my father seemed like a real person. My dad didn’t drink much then beyond his one glass of whiskey after a shift, but the others did. They were swearing at one another over slurred words and then someone banged on the table. I heard a waterfall of poker chips hit the floor.

“You’re a cheater,” my dad had said in a way I’d never heard him speak before, like it was hard for him to breathe between those three words. And then someone said, “Your wife was the cheater, you weak piece of shit. No wonder she left you.”

When I lifted my eyes from the hallway floor, I saw my dad staring at me, shaking with rage in the doorway to the kitchen. My legs had been too numb to move when I heard his footsteps coming. He yelled at me to go to my room. Someone slammed a bottle on the table. Someone said, “Sorry, Seb, things got out of hand. He’s had too much to drink.”

In the morning my dad said he was sorry I had to hear that, and I had shrugged and said, “Hear what?”

“Blythe, people might think bad things about you that aren’t true. The only thing that matters is what you believe about yourself.”

I drank my orange juice and he drank his coffee and I thought, My father is better than those men. But something had been said that night that rang in my ears—weak. You weak piece of shit. I thought of all the times he never stood up for himself, never asked her to stay home from the city. I thought of the wet dishcloth hanging from the side of his head. I thought of the man who’d called, of the clumps of fleshy blood in the toilet. Of the pills he never took away, of the smashed dishes he always cleaned up. Of his quiet retreats to the couch. I hated that my mother had left him, but I wondered if he ever really tried to stop her.

51

I started writing again by throwing out every word I’d written before Sam died. My brain had changed, as though it were on a different frequency than before. Before. After. After felt curt, my sentences abrupt and sharp, like every paragraph could hurt someone. There was so much anger on the page, but I didn’t know what else to do with it. I wrote about things I knew nothing about. War. Pioneering. A mechanic shop. I sent the first short story I finished to a literary magazine that had published me before I had children. Their reply was as brusque as my submission letter, and it felt gratifying, the same way smearing blood across my stomach had felt after Sam died. Fuck you. I didn’t write this for you anyway. None of it made any sense but it filled the hours I had to get through.

I started going to a coffee shop a short walk away where they didn’t play music and the mugs were like bowls. There was a man I often saw there, a young man, maybe seven or eight years younger than I was. He would work on his laptop, never got refills. We both liked to sit near the back, away from the draft of the door. I liked the way he hung his jacket on his chair, so that the thick lining of the hood created a comfortable place for his back to rest on, and I started hanging my coat the same way.