Not Tony’s emotional emergency flight to Montego Bay or the silly stranger game in the bar, not getting her hair chopped off or her pubic hair ripped out. Not grand gestures or great sex or tearful conversation on the beach—but the thing that all of that was reaching for. That moment when you remembered why you were in this in the first place, and you came back to it. You figured out that somewhere along the line, you’d pressed Pause on your marriage, your truth, your real feelings. You looked at the button.
And you hit it again to start the music playing.
Maybe no one could hear it but her and Tony, but that didn’t matter. It was playing inside her now, and she didn’t simply hope things would change. She knew it. She would make them change. Tony would, too.
She knew.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.
He put his hand over the back of her neck, rubbing his thumb along her bare nape. “Anytime, bun.”
Ten minutes later, they were home.
The house blazed with a profligate amount of light. The kids spilled into the garage, Jacob’s hands on the passenger door handle, his body blocking her so she couldn’t even get out of the truck. “Mama!”
It was his babyish name for her—the name he didn’t use anymore because his brothers teased him, but tonight it didn’t matter. He climbed up. She helped him into her lap, swung her legs over the side.
“What happened to your hair?” he asked.
Anthony was spinning in circles, Clark hanging back in the doorway to the kitchen. Behind him, her mother.
The dog barking, paws landing on her legs. Everybody talking at once.
Tony carried the luggage in. Amber carried Jacob, steering Anthony with a hand on his back. There were model airplanes spread out on newspaper on the kitchen table, Amber’s dad and Jamila there, along with Katie and her boyfriend, a fine paintbrush in Sean’s fingers.
“We made planes, Mama! Mine is the red one, and Ant’s is the blue, and Clark got to make the big one but it’s not done yet. Grandpa showed us how. And I was sick this morning but I’m not anymore, and Grandma says it’s because I was malingering but she won’t tell me what that means. Did you bring me anything?”
“Yeah, what did you get us?” Anthony asked.
It kept going like that. Noise and lively energy. A house full of bright light and life.
Clark stood quiet, watchful on the periphery. Katie looked at her with a question in her eyes. Did it work? Are you guys better?
Amber waited for the yoke to settle over her shoulders and weigh her down, because yeah, there was going to be a lot of plodding in the next few days. Hours still to spend tonight, getting the kids to sleep. She’d have to give each of them time alone with her. Figure out what to tell them that would be true, and would give them peace. Everyone in this kitchen would want to talk to her, at some point. Well, everyone but Sean. And their anxiety—their expectations—that was a weight to bear, too.
Anthony ricocheted off the table, collided with the suitcase in Tony’s hand, tripped over the dog, fell down, and hit his head on the wooden step stool Jacob used to reach the water cups. He started to cry.
Tony caught her eye across the crowded kitchen, over the sound of her mother’s voice and Anthony’s howling. “I’ll take this one,” he said.
And she wasn’t afraid.
You, she thought. I choose you. I choose this.
Again.
Again.
Always you.
* * *
Katie and Sean left first, right when Amber took the kids upstairs. Then Jamila, off to join her boyfriend at the hotel in Mount Pleasant where she stayed when she came to Ohio.
Janet and Derek were last.
“Would you go warm up the car?” Janet asked her husband, and Derek cleared out, leaving Tony alone again with his mother-in-law.
In all the years he and Amber had been together, Tony couldn’t remember being alone with Janet more than a handful of times. Now it was happening for the second time in a couple days—and once again, he fervently wished he were somewhere else.