The Night Letter

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Ted put his bags in the rear of his wife's truck and got in the passenger side. Hannah was in the back seat watching one of her favorite movies, every line of which she knew and could recite, as they all could. The movies contributed to a common language that bound them but she was quiet because, he thought, his presence was strange to her now. He wanted to talk to her and tease and play but the silence between mother and daughter was far more intimate than anything he could achieve. It was the silence of perfect understanding and his clumsy intrusion into it would only upset a hard won equilibrium. Giada was the undemonstrative parent. The discipline came from her. "Act like grown folk," she would tell her misbehaving daughter. Ted would have liked to keep Hannah a baby a while longer, lest he felt he had missed out on something later.

"You're from work?" Giada worked from home 2 days a week but often was called into the office. There was a box of tissues on the console between them. "Allergies or sick?" he asked.

"Does it matter? It hurts the same," she said, her voice altered with congestion.

"It looks like I'm going to deploy with Steve Vanderpoel and Conor Ward. I think you met them both before. I guess they're OK."

"I would say this guy drives like my grandmother but my grandmother is actually a good driver. He's been in front of me the whole time," Giada said. It had been one of the sacrifices of parenthood to give up profanity, at least when Hannah was around, and sometimes he missed the creative ways Giada used to swear. "Do you know how many national partners my firm has who are female?"

"Four?"

"Four!" Giada said. She was progressive on issues that affected her directly but otherwise reactionary.

"Do you have anything happy to say?"

"Meow."

"Have you heard a word I said?" He said. It was a question he asked a thousand times before. She would be a fool to be caught off sides by it and she was no fool.

"Vanderpoel, Ward. I met them before, they're OK, you guess," she said. He sometimes forgot how sharp she was, how many knives she could juggle. Her ability was so far beyond his own he thought the adderall might have given her the advantage and he was tempted by it, any potential for self improvement being tempting, but he didn't want to test positive for it. "You forget Steve and I graduated from the same law school class. He has the dull look of a caged animal. I don't know much about the other guy," he said. Again it looked like Giada wasn't listening but he thought it best not to challenge her on the matter. "How is Hannah?" He asked.

"97th percentile," she said.

When they got home Giada took Hannah inside and Ted fetched his bags, but he was looking at the brick and cream colored vinyl addition they had recently put on the house as if expecting to find something that needed to be fixed. It was a newer subdivision, reclaimed from farmland. When the rays of the setting sun lay over it almost horizontally as they were doing now, it still almost looked like a farm. The effect was almost unsettling as if the fertility in the soil had been thwarted and the restless land was trying to remember something, a happy memory, and might at any moment shake the people off its back and get back to work. Giada, who was sensitive to such things, said she could hear the ghosts of wounded soldiers moaning on battlefields of Manassas, plodding shoves pulling wagonloads of the dead even though the blood was now covered by dust and pavement and houses and buildings. She even hated the name. Despite the other puns it lent itself to, it sounded to her like massacre. he didn't completely believe in her visions but her knowledge about other things was uncanny enough he could at least humor her.