The girl had her mother’s dark eyes and dark curly hair but her skin was darker than Maria’s. That was all Grant knew about the father.
“Anyway,” the girl said, snapping down a credit card. “Here’s this.”
“Did you have them check the transmission fluid?”
“I checked it myself. It’s fine.”
“Who showed you how to do that?”
“This hitchhiker dude I picked up.”
“Oh, that’s funny. Isn’t she funny, Mr. Courtland?”
There was a sound, a playful chirrup, and the girl glanced at her phone. She kissed her mother on the cheek and dismounted from the bar. “Gotta go, Jenna’s waiting.”
“You two be good,” Maria said.
“You too.”
“And not one second past midnight, I mean it.”
The girl strode back through the restaurant and the high school kids watched her go. One of the boys bugged out his eyes and Grant’s heart filled with violence. He saw himself crossing over and lifting the boy out of the booth by his throat.
“So she got the car,” he said.
Maria looked to the ceiling in wonder. “When she drove it off the lot, just her, sitting behind that wheel, I thought, This can’t be happening, look at her, look how young!”
She turned to him and touched his forearm. “Oh God, I’m sorry—”
Grant shook his head. Hush. He patted her small hand.
When she got off work at ten o’clock she found him where she’d left him, hunched over his drinks. There was a kind of scene outside in the yellow lamplight when he would not surrender his keys, but finally he dropped them into his pocket and got into her Subaru. Maria was not expecting anything. There had been plenty of time for something to happen and it hadn’t, and she was fine with that.
Grant sat with his hands capping his knees, his eyes fixed on the road unspooling in the lights. Maria punched on the radio, listened a moment to some country song, and punched it off.
“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.
“Who is?”
“Your girl. Carmen.”
“Thank you.”
“And smart. Smart. I bet she’s ready to drive that car right off to college.”
Maria looked over at him. He pawed at the chest pocket of his jacket and then stopped and put his hand back on his knee. “You can smoke if you want to,” she said. “Seriously. I think I’ve even got one of those lighter things . . .”
“Right here,” he said, thumbing in the knob. He got a cigarette to his lips and gapped the window. The lighter popped and he guided the coil with care. He blew the smoke through the opening, and then held the ember as near to the wind as he could without destroying it. The wedding band on his finger glowed a dull green-gold in the light from the dash.
“Well,” Maria said. “What about Sean?”
“What about him?”
“Is he getting ready for college?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Doesn’t that—” she said. “Don’t you want to?”
He nosed the cigarette slowly to the wind, absorbed, until the embers flared and flew off like bright little hatchlings.
She said: “I’m sorry, I’m overstepping.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m taking advantage of the circumstances.”
“Which circumstances?”
She glanced at him, then looked back to the road. Slowing for a blind curve, her beams swept a stand of aspens—white skins flashing for a lurid instant and dodging back into darkness.
After a silence Grant said, “Ask me something I can answer,” and she nodded and said, “All right. All right, I’ve always been curious: what happened to those fingers?”
“Which fingers?”
She gave him a look, and he opened his hand before the windshield.
“Was it a work accident?” she said. “Like a saw or something?”
“No. Well, there was a saw, but it wasn’t a work accident. It was a drinking accident.”
“Oh.”
“I used to be a drinker.”
“Oh.”
“The turnoff’s coming up.”
“I know. But thanks.”
When they reached the ranch he had her circle around the big spruce and park in front of the old ranch house. He struggled with the seat belt until she leaned over to get it. The black spill of her hair, the up-close smell of it.
“Maybe I should come in and make you some coffee,” she said. “Do you have coffee in there?”
The Labrador met them on the porch and Maria put her knuckles to the dog’s nose and tousled the soft ears. Grant held open the door and flicked on the light and saw at once the drab utility, the male disregard. Whiff of laundry he’d let pile up because he didn’t like the sound of the machines, that humming and thumping, that false lulling.
“Make yourself at home,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Over to check with Emmet. Come on, you,” he said to the dog.
From the window over the sink she watched man and dog cross the clearing in the blue light. Grant walked upright and steady in a way that made her heart shift. She had tried to imagine it—what happened to him happening to her, her daughter—but she could not, not even for a second. Bad things happened to good people. God had his plan, always. But how did that help this man? His family? That girl? She began looking for the coffee.
Grant stopped short of Emmet’s porch and stood before the living room window. Through the glass he could hear the argument between two TV crime solvers. Electric auroras of blue and green played over the walls and over the old man’s white-socked feet on the footrest. The remote stood upright in his spotty hand but his eyes were shut and his stubbled jaw had fallen. Grant thought of his children, his own children—of carrying them to their beds when they were small. The limp human weight of them, the young scent of their skins, the murmurs as he lay them down. Angela waiting downstairs with a glass of wine, bare feet up under her on the sofa. He stood outside the old man’s window remembering that this had happened, that it was true.