“Where’s the car?”
My mother stirred her tea with small, neat circles. Then she said, in a tone so casual it felt like being struck without any wind-up: “Oh. That.”
My father’s knife paused for a moment, not stopped, just considered, and then resumed.
My mother finally raised her eyes to me. They were soft, almost relieved, like someone delivering news they had rehearsed.
“Thanks to your car,” she said, “Andrew finally got the trip of his life.”
The words arrived but did not immediately assemble into meaning. My brain ran them through twice, the way you run an order through twice when the radio is breaking up, trying to hear clearly what was just transmitted.
My father exhaled through his nose. “It’s done,” he said. As if that resolved it.
“What do you mean it’s done?” I asked.
“Andrew needed something good, Emily,” my mother said. “You know how hard it’s been for him.”
Hard.
