That, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to say.
I stepped out of the doorway.
“Do not bring my children into this conversation.”
“They’re standing there staring—”
“They have spent three mornings sitting in my car on that driveway while you made them late for school. They can stand in their own hallway.”
Ben, with the superb timing that is the particular gift of eight-year-olds, said, “We were late because of her car.”
Ezoic
“Ben,” I said. “Go upstairs.”
“But I just want to—”
“Upstairs. Now.”
Both boys evaporated.
Denise pointed at the house. “You see, this is exactly what I mean. You’re making this enormous—”
“You parked across my driveway twenty-two mornings in a row,” I said. “I’m not making anything larger than it is.”
“It wasn’t twenty-two.”
I opened the photographs on my phone.
“May twenty-seventh,” I said. “Twenty-eighth. Twenty-ninth. Thirty-first. June third—”
