The drive home from Bar None serves up more traffic than I expected, but it gives me time to think about instincts and why I have them, and why it’s foolish to ignore them. Ray’s gut reaction confirmed my own. When I walk through the door four hours late, Elizabeth simply says, “Dinner’s in ten,” with a smile, and she accepts my wilted herbs, unexplained delay, and faint whiff of Bar None without comment. So I kiss her on the cheek, tell her how nice dinner looks, ask where the boys are, and try to act indifferent when she replies, “Out.”

We eat, just the two of us, like normal, asking questions about work and what we’ve heard about the house next door that’s up for sale, and what we’ve heard about our former neighbors. I clean my plate, clear the table, offer to do the dishes and do them. “When are they coming back?”

“Who, the boys? Beats me.” Elizabeth falls into the couch and a book, so I settle into my leather chair to read the latest Smithsonian magazine, and everything’s normal for a while. Normal and sterile and terribly quiet.

•  •  •

Eight thirty in the morning, I bang on the guesthouse door and Nick answers, rubbing his eyes, so I ask if I woke him, and he answers, “That’s okay.” When I insist on giving him a ride to a nice stretch of beach he hasn’t seen, he resists until he doesn’t. Takes him ten minutes to brush his teeth and put on flip-flops.

We hit green lights all the way. I ask, “So what’s your deal, Nick Carpenter?”

“My deal?” He closes an air vent.

“You like jogging and pizza. You like fishing but don’t fish. What else?”

He laughs. “What do you want to know?”

“Got big plans for the future?”

“Not really,” he says. “I’m better at living life than planning it, you know what I mean?”

“No. What do you mean?”

He pauses, then answers, “I guess it feels important to do whatever is in front of me at any given time, to do it well and see where life goes. Sounds corny, probably.”

I can’t argue with that. “A little reckless, too.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he says, “but I don’t want to wait until I’m old to do the shit I want to do. Like, maybe I won’t get old. Or maybe it won’t be fun anymore. I don’t want to miss the fun.”

“Interesting.”

“Oh. There is one thing. I have an aunt, lived with her through high school. She’s all the family I have left. I have this dream of helping her fix up the house. Maybe build her a screened-in porch. She worked hard to make that place my home. I’d love to do something for her in return. That’s the extent of my future planning, though.” He laughs.