“Mom,” I said. “Where are my keys?”
She slammed the cabinet door. The sound was unnecessary and meant to be, a little preview of the conversation she had already decided we were having. She still didn’t turn around.
“Ethan needs the car today,” she said. “He has responsibilities.”
The word responsibilities arrived in the kitchen and settled there like a gas with no smell, the kind that is already in your lungs before you know it’s in the air. Ethan’s responsibilities, in the three weeks since his car developed a flat tire he had not fixed and perhaps would not fix, had consisted primarily of driving my car to his girlfriend’s apartment and leaving it in her parking lot while he stayed until two or three in the morning, then driving it back while the fuel gauge dropped, and then hanging the keys back on the hook in the morning close enough to their original position that Sandra could pretend not to notice.
“What responsibilities,” I said. Not a question.
“He’s been stressed,” Sandra said, turning now, holding the plate, and what I saw on her face was not the face of a woman who had lost track of an argument. It was the face of a woman who had rehearsed one. “You know how he gets. He needs to unwind.”
“I need to go to work,” I said. “The job that pays the mortgage.”
She opened her mouth but the garage door opened first and my father walked in, Harold, wearing his overalls and carrying the rag he used to wipe grease from his hands with approximately the same frequency he used his hands for something other than grease. He took in the scene with the automatic assessment of a man who has decided that his daughter is the source of household conflict regardless of what he is actually walking into.
