Something new has moved into the space between him and Cate, and she suspects it’s her attachment to his mother’s assault. It doesn’t matter that Cate’s part was stopping it. She was there. She saw it. It’s stuck to her. She’s dirty by association. She hopes this is a phase they will pass through, that there will come a time when her presence doesn’t carry the smell of the kitchen that day when he walked in, after everything was over, onto a stage littered with props from the previous scene. The spilled groceries, eggs drooling out of their shells, milk carton busted. A plastic bag of fun-size Snickers torn open with the candy bars scattered along with some empty wrappers. Meaning they ate candy while the whole thing was going on. They fucking ate candy.

“Going to the john,” he says as he climbs over their knees.

Cate puts a hand on Neale’s. “I’ve been going by the Aldi.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Not yet.”

“You should stop. If she was going to come back at me, she would’ve done it by now. It’s over. Don’t keep it alive. We need to move along. On our merry way.”

isle of mull

She and Maureen have perfected the rituals of dating but haven’t really moved beyond them. And lately Maureen has dropped mentioning hypothetical moves forward in even the middle-distant future. Maybe she has grown wary. The only event they’ve pinned to their horizon is the trip in May to Scotland. They sit on the floor this night in February looking over travel magazines and guidebooks opened and scattered across Maureen’s coffee table.

“Look at this castle on Mull!” Cate tries to pin an exclamation point on this sentence, hoping to convey excitement, but doesn’t quite pull it off. Their tickets have been bought; they’ve booked a small cabin on a small ship run by a company specializing in educational tourism. Maureen’s news tonight is that she has upgraded them to a bigger cabin on the ship; the theme park costumes she’s designing have turned out to be a bonanza for her.

Maureen does not look at the castle. Instead she says, in a tone that applies a sympathetic overlay on exasperation, “By May, you’ll probably be in more of a vacation mood.”

“I know yes would be the best response here, but the truth is I don’t know what kind of mood I’ll be in a couple of months from now. Or even tomorrow. Too much is going on. In my life, but also in my head. Do you remember that carnival ride? I don’t know why I’m reminding you about old carnival rides. Your father probably built one in your backyard. So it was a cylinder and you strapped yourself standing against the inside wall. And then it started spinning and then it started tilting—”