“Alison? You okay?”
“I, um… I just remembered I told the sitter I’d call. I should go.”
“You don’t have a sitter tonight.”
“How is this even possible?”
“I meant my friend. I’m sorry, I have to…”
I didn’t wait for him to respond. I gathered Mia, made some excuse about her being tired, and drove home with my hands trembling on the steering wheel.
***
I couldn’t sleep. After putting Mia to bed, I pulled out the plastic bin of photographs I’d been avoiding for a year.
I gathered Mia.
There they were from the Flagstaff trip.
Mike smiling into the camera outside the tattoo parlor, a fresh square of gauze taped behind his ear, sunburned, young, and immortal.
The next photograph in the stack showed the two of them at a diner an hour or perhaps a day later, Harold laughing, his head turned halfway toward Mike as though responding to something. His ear was bare in the light. Nothing behind it. Just the freckled skin of a boy who’d changed his mind at the last second.
