• • •

John took a new route home, leaving the expressway a few exits early, trying to avoid traffic, and after they exited, there was a long stretch of strip mall that seemed to go on forever. It was the type of neighborhood that was all proximity; you could turn left or right at any point off the boulevard and find a house that would inspire longing, part of your neighborhood technically, but not part of your world, with a quiet, lumbering grace that marked nobility, remove, other. Carrie was separate from all those people, she knew, and always had been. Not more deserving or less, just different from everyone else.

At the corner was a car wash, flashing a neon sign. John looked at her, raising his eyes for permission, and she nodded.

Together they watched Carrie’s car through the glass, watched as it was gripped by the metal clamps, moving slowly, grinding, until the first shelf of water came down. The fat foam fingers slapped the doors and roof, the hard water pounding the dust, the prints, the residue. She watched the gray spumes of water fall off the car, waited until they turned to transparent steam when they hit the cold pavement.

Outside, the conveyor spat it out, half dry. A man in a gray uniform appeared with a folded brown towel. He wiped the car steadily, in even strokes, patient in a way that reminded her of someone. He looked up at her for just a second, and she was sure, for a moment, that she was looking into the eyes of her father.

The man walked behind her car and back into the vaulted garage, disappearing behind a cloud of steam. She ran back to the viewing room, craning her neck around the train of cars going through the steam. But no one was there. The man who looked like her father was gone.

She closed her eyes. I’ll be different, she thought suddenly. I’ll do better. I’ll keep my car cleaner. I’ll lock my doors. I’ll work harder. I’ll pay more attention. I’ll be more like everyone else. That could be her promise. Her exchange. Because after all, if Ben came back once, couldn’t Ben come back again?

When she opened her eyes, John still lingered at the counter, looking at the products, paying the bill. She walked outside and watched other men, men in the same gray uniforms but who looked like no one, wiping the doors and roof and trunk with their cloths, men who could be anyone, criminals or workers, alive or dead.

The sprays of water, the grind of the conveyor belt, and above them, suddenly, the honk of geese. Carrie watched the dark dotted V traveling south, the slate clouds behind them auguring rain, change, autumn. The birds’ pathway through the mist, the heavy air that hung just below the clouds, was a route known only to them. Wasn’t migration of anything, living or dead, always part mystery to anyone else who happened along the way? How could she explain what she knew, that small part, to anyone, even herself?

They got back in their car and headed home.

“You know what I was thinking?” John said as he eased onto Sugarland Road. “I was thinking that when we’re ready to have another child, we might try for a girl. Maybe do that thing where you spin the sperm. It would feel like a true new start.”

In the air between them, the memories of all those boyish nights in the backyard with Ben. All those Saturday afternoons of John with his own father and brother, doing the same thing.

Carrie blinked. “Really?”

“Well,” John added, “of course, she’d have to be a tomboy.”

Carrie smiled and squeezed his hand. They passed properties so large they looked like farms. Farms with barns but no crops. Places with no reason for being the way they were anymore.

“And…could we have a dog, maybe?”

“I don’t think that’s genetically possible.” John laughed.

“I mean in addition, Frog.” Then she added softly, “A girl and a dog.” As if testing out the sound and the weight of that sentence.

“Why not,” he said.

“The dog can be a boy.”

As they idled at the next red light, John reached in his pocket. He pulled out an air freshener in the shape of a tree and hung it on the mirror where Ben’s shoe used to be. And from his other pocket, he took a fat roll of quarters and nestled them in the console.

“Just in case,” he said. “Just in case.”