“Sorry!” came again. This time it was Maggie, and the word sounded more gentle coming from her, as though she really did feel sorry. What a funny word: sorry. You could toss it around so casually when you accidentally cut somebody off in the grocery store or wanted the waitress to repeat the specials. Or you could scream it at someone, like she had last night at Jeremy, lying through both syllables.

“What do you want?” she’d screamed finally, once they’d allowed the fight to escalate to the level they both secretly wanted it to be.

“I want you to stop sneaking around behind my back! I want you to say you’re sorry! I want you to fire her.”

Oh, it had been awful, the rage she’d felt. She’d felt like she could hurt someone.

“Lu!” he said, when she didn’t answer. (His voice was so sharp!) “Did you hear me? I want you to fire her.”

Lu understood that on the surface the fight was about Maggie, but on a deeper, more insidious level it was about the baby. A third baby would require resources; Jeremy didn’t want those resources going somewhere else. Jeremy didn’t want Lu physically or emotionally separated from the boys because he wanted her in the maternal mind-set.

“Did you hear me, Lu?” His voice had turned gentler, but her ire was reaching toward the ceiling.

“I heard you,” she yelled. “Fine! Okay! I’m sorry!”

That was all he’d needed, it turned out, the word, not the actual meaning behind the word. How easy it was sometimes to fake it.

When Jeremy was sleeping she’d slipped out of bed to text Maggie. Can you come tomorrow too? Something came up.

Sebastian came down in tears, complaining that Chase had knocked back his blue piece with the red piece and he’d had to go all the way back to the blue circle at the start.

“But that’s how the game is played,” said Lu, though three-quarters of her mind was on the cornbread. (Was buttermilk absolutely necessary?) “If you landed on a space that Chase was on, you’d be able to do the exact same thing to him.”

Lu and her sister had played endless board games when they were little, because they were so often alone while their mother was at work. Clue. Risk. Yahtzee. Trouble. Pre-Internet, of course.

“Well, I didn’t like it,” said Sebastian. “Chase was being mean.”

Lu sighed, turning her attention from her cornbread to her son. Maybe Sorry! was too complex for a four-year-old. Sebastian was too little to understand how much of it was just due to chance. Also it took a long time to get through a complete game, if she recalled correctly, probably far too long for his teeny-tiny attention span. He did look despondent. “Maggie!” she called up the stairs. “I think maybe a different game, if that’s okay!” Then she thought for a fraction of a second and added, “Sorry!” She didn’t know if Maggie would get the joke but she had given herself a little chuckle.