“What?”
“It’s early. My little girl is still sleeping. Would you mind keeping the bag quiet for another hour?”
Trent looked at his watch, then at Joseph’s coffee cup. “You know this is my house, right?”
“I know you live there.”
“And I can work out on my own property.”
“I’m not disputing that. I’m asking for some consideration.”
Trent laughed. “Maybe if you got up and trained instead of sitting around drinking coffee, you wouldn’t be so soft.”
Joseph studied him for a moment. Beneath the anger and the practiced sneer was a boy trying very hard to look like a man. It would have been easy to answer in the same language. Joseph had been surrounded by the loud confidence of young men before, and he knew what happened when nobody taught them when to stop. But he also knew how quickly a public argument could become the most important thing in a foolish person’s day.
“An hour,” Joseph repeated. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m testing for my black belt next week,” Trent said. “My coach says discipline means training when everyone else sleeps.”
“Discipline also means knowing when someone else needs sleep.”
Trent leaned forward. “You giving me lessons now?”
“No. I’m going inside.”
He slid the door shut behind him. The heavy bag began to swing again almost immediately, each impact deliberately louder than the last.
Joseph stood in the kitchen and considered whether to knock on Richard Harrington’s front door. He could speak to a parent about a child, but Trent was nineteen, old enough to vote and old enough to choose his behavior. He could submit a noise complaint. The thought was unpleasant, not because it frightened him, but because he had bought this house to escape the feeling that every small problem required a chain of command.
Instead he made the pancakes.
Khloe came downstairs at six-thirty with her hair tangled and her rabbit under one arm. She sat at the kitchen island and watched the first pancake turn dark around the edges.
“You talked to him?”
“I did.”
“Did he say sorry?”
“Not exactly.”
She thought about that. “Then he should practice being nicer before he practices kicking.”
Joseph placed a pancake on her plate and smiled. “That’s an excellent training plan.”
At eight, he walked her to the bus stop. The other parents stood in little circles discussing vacations, sports camps, and a school fundraiser. Joseph listened to Mary describe a rabbit that had eaten her newly planted basil. Khloe ran toward her friend Maya, who had saved her a seat. When the bus rolled away, she pressed her palm to the window until Joseph raised his hand in reply.
He watched the vehicle turn the corner before starting home. Behind him, Trent’s car roared out of the Harrington driveway, a new black BMW that Richard had purchased after his son’s last tournament. The exhaust echoed between the houses.
Joseph took the long route past the pond. He wanted ten minutes of walking in a neighborhood he had paid so much to make peaceful. Yet he noticed, with a growing unease he could not quite dismiss, that tranquility built out of expensive houses was not the same thing as kindness.
Chapter 3: The Promise in the Hospital Room
Three years before the trouble with the Harringtons, Joseph spent a winter evening in a hospital room with a paper cup of coffee cooling between his hands. He had been awake for nearly twenty hours. Outside the window, the city glowed through light snowfall, every streetlamp surrounded by a small halo of white. Inside, the radiator clicked and the monitoring equipment made the gentle, indifferent sounds of machines doing their work.
Sarah lay propped against pillows, thinner than she had been a month before, her hair tucked beneath a soft blue scarf. She had spent the afternoon listening to Khloe describe a school project and laughing at a joke that wasn’t particularly funny. After their daughter left with Sarah’s sister, the room seemed to lose half its air.
Joseph stood beside the bed arranging the water glass and straightening the blanket. He had already adjusted both twice. Sarah watched him for a moment.
“You’re doing the thing,” she said.
He stopped. “What thing?”
“Trying to repair the room.”
He looked at the blanket. “It’s crooked.”
“It’s a blanket, Joe. It can be crooked.”
He sat down. The chair creaked beneath him. For several minutes they listened to a cart rolling past in the hallway. Joseph wanted to talk about plans, schedules, appointments, and any other subject that allowed him to believe the coming weeks could be managed if he only worked hard enough.
