They all froze, watching him. He was standing next to the television. He raised a hand and, as if smashing an insect, brought it down against the control panel, turning the set off. “Just,” he said. “Shut. Up.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then Karen, who’d been poised on her toes, slowly lowered her body until her feet were flat on the carpet. She opened her mouth to speak.

“I’m telling you,” Roy said. His hand left the set and hovered in front of him, closing into a fist. He knew he should release it. It wasn’t a gesture he’d ever made in front of any of them before, not out of anger, not like this. It was an awful moment, but a moment part of him clearly wanted to take place. “I don’t want to hear another word spoken in this room tonight,” he heard himself say. “Not a single goddamned word from any of you.”

Teresa’s eyes had grown large. She still had a hand on the bathroom doorknob and was looking at him intently, waiting, he thought, for some indication that she was exempt from this crazy dictum. He wouldn’t give it to her; she wasn’t exempt. He didn’t want to hear from her, didn’t want to hear from himself. He wanted only to be somewhere else, and though that somewhere else was not, by any means, either one of the two double beds in front of him, he chose one and stretched out, only then releasing his fist to fold his hands over his chest, his eyes already closed, all sensation transferred, suddenly, to the heat of embarrassment and shame he felt behind his face. He listened to their breathing, and to their efforts at communicating with one another in sighs and low grunts of complaint and the occasional, anonymous whimper.

He woke up early the next morning. With careful, quiet movements, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, and pulled on his shoes. He found a pen in Teresa’s purse, and on the back of the brown paper lunch sack in which she’d packed their toiletries, he scribbled a note saying that he’d gone to the island to check on the house and the store. “Back soon,” he wrote, and signed it with an R.

The perimeter of the vinyl curtain was glowing. When he opened the door, the room was flooded with sunlight. He put on his sunglasses, stepped outside, and eased the door shut behind him.