“I don’t go through your drawers, Mom,” she said, looking past my shoulder toward the kitchen.
“It was there on Tuesday when I filed the water bill,” I said.
“Maybe you misplaced it,” she said, her words overlapping mine before I could finish the sentence. “You’ve been forgetting where you put things lately.”
She turned and ran up the stairs, her steps loud on the pine treads, leaving me standing in the narrow hallway with the smell of her lavender laundry detergent.
I walked into the dining room, where the light was better, and sat at the long cherry wood table. The grocery list for the party was spread out on the polished wood, next to a small stack of coupons I had clipped from the Sunday paper.
Ethan was already sitting there, his fifteen-year-old shoulders hunched over a blank sheet of lined paper. He was cracking his knuckles, one by one, a habit he had started during the first month of the separation.
“We need to decide on the meat,” I said, keeping my voice level. “I was thinking hot dogs and hamburgers, like we did last year.”
Ethan did not look up from his paper. He cracked his thumb, the sound sharp in the quiet dining room.
“We should get the bone-in ribeyes from the butcher on Elm Street,” he said.
“Those are forty dollars a pound, Ethan,” I said. “We have twenty people coming to the yard.”
“Dad only eats steak when he goes to a cookout,” Ethan said, his voice flat and mature, devoid of the usual teenage whine. “He says hot dogs are for people who don’t care about their guests.”
I looked at my son’s profile, his jawline starting to show the same sharp angle as his father’s. He was still trying to build a bridge across a river that had already dried up.
“Your father might not have much time for eating, Ethan,” I said. “He has a lot of things to take care of.”
