Chapter 13: Six Weeks

Chase said the date a second time, louder, so the phone would catch it.

Lacey held the phone higher, and the little red light stayed steady.

Nobody in the tunnel had said the word father yet, and I understood that this was the point of the phone.

Zach turned his shoulder to the lens, so that Gus's face was against his jersey.

"You're filming a baby," he said. "Page forty-four says you need a release."

"Page forty-four is mine," I said.

"It's a public tunnel," Lacey said sweetly.

"Then say hello to the public," Zach said, and he lifted his mother's pie in his free hand and held it in front of her lens.

"Mine's longer," Lyle said.

He held up his own phone, with its own little red light.

Lacey looked at it for a long moment.

She lowered hers.

"Sunday, honey," she said to me, and she tugged Chase away by the sleeve of his dirty jersey.

Chase went, looking back twice.

Zach breathed out and kissed the top of Gus's head.

"I didn't say it," he said quietly. "I wasn't going to say it for her phone."

"I know," I said. "Say it for mine."

He looked at me over the baby.

"Not tonight," I said. "Tonight I have a different clause."

That night Lyle stood at the bottom of his stairs with his arms out.

"I raised a daughter," he said. "Give him here."

On the second shelf of his refrigerator sat a bottle of milk with a label-maker label that said GUS, 2 A.M.

"He will not be drunk on," Lyle said, "and he will not be dropped."

"Lyle, you don't have to."

"Go upstairs, Janie. There's a man in your kitchen with a casserole dish and a very worried face."

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