The morning Brittany left for Napa started like every other morning in the six years since the accident, which is to say it started with the particular careful choreography our household had developed around Noah’s needs, around schedules and medications and the management of a life organized by what he could not do. She kissed him on the forehead and rolled her suitcase behind her and smiled at me from the doorway in the way she smiled when she wanted you to see a woman who had earned the right to three days away, which was a smile I had always accepted at face value because I had always believed we were telling the same story about our lives.
“You boys survive without me,” she said.
I lifted my coffee. “We’ll try not to destroy the house.”
She laughed, blew Noah a kiss, walked out to her white SUV, and backed down the driveway in the unhurried way of someone whose plans are entirely in order. I watched her brake lights disappear around the corner of our quiet Columbus street, and the house settled into the silence it always found when she left, that particular exhale of a space that has been held at a certain tension and finally released it.
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