She was in the parlor, on the year-old sofa covered in blue-black velvet with a raised floral scroll of navy. She was sitting with knees together, hands in her lap, head tilted back against the rest. Not sleeping but with her eyes closed. He sat in the peg-back Windsor opposite, feet apart, elbows on his knees, chin cupped. He waited but not long and his voice broke into the room. He liked it, liked the way it filled up the room that for weeks now had seemed to him shrouded with fragments and whispers and held-back sighs, with her lackened to a pulse just able to carry life, not even forward but maintaining a stasis. His voice brash as hammered piano ivory, he said, “You made an effort, maybe you could tell me just how long you expect to go on like this. Then I’d know, we’d all know, how much more of this horseshit’s piled up ahead. Seems to me that’s fair to ask. Since you cannot or will not tell me. Maybe just don’t want to or don’t even know whatever it was bound you up tight as a bandage on your little trip back down home. And I guess that’s your business. But there’s a family right here in front of you that each one wonders where it is you’ve gone. Even that little chap wonders where his mother’s got off to. You thought about that? How it is for him? Little boy doesn’t know first thing about any of this at all. All he knows is Mother’s a stranger to him. Me, I never saw you the sort to let your own misery spill over onto somebody else, least of all some helpless little feller like that. Not to mention the rest of us. The rest of us can go to hell I guess. Seems like that’s how you’d have it, at least.”

He paused then, took breath, considered if his anger was out of him and it was not but surged again.

“You won’t talk to me. All right. I don’t like it but I can live with it. Maybe someday you will. Nobody there, you said. Well. I’m not an idiot. So. What you learned was not what you’d hoped for. Maybe even worse than what you’d feared. I’m guessing. Guessing since that’s all I can do. Goddammit Leah, I’m tired of this. I never once stopped you from doing what you wanted or thought was best and more times than you might think another man would have. And most all those times you were right on the money. I give you that. But I’m here to tell you. Right now. I will not live like this. I cannot see the way to live like this. And I won’t do it and I can’t see what to do about it. So. You. It’s your turn. You’ve got to tell me something and I don’t know what it is. But you do. So.”