Hey, what’s your due date, the mother asked at some point, on a whim. She asked with a strange expression on her face. She didn’t know she wore the expression and didn’t mean the thing the expression seemed to mean she meant. They’d gone through the whole house already and were back in the first room where they started, with the couple standing close together, arms at their sides. The mother was standing near another window when she said it, the whole back of her head and spine aflush with light coming down into the house from outside, though in the outside now it was night, and there were no streetlamps and no moon or stars. There was nothing, not even the yard.
The couple’s mouths were closed.
The mother made a motion at her own midsection as if there were a bigger belly there—where the son had been upon her sometime and now was just the air. She nodded between the blank space and the woman, drawing lines out with the motion of her head.
The man looked hard at the mother, shook his head. He shook his head so hard it briefly blurred. Stopping again, he looked older.
The mother’s mouth continued moving without sound. She touched her own face, which felt like anybody’s. She felt her jaw pulse in its gristle.
The man touched the silent woman on the back.
She’s sickly, the man said. His voice was so small, sticky. She’s not been feeling well. It’s been known to go around.
The woman sniffed and sniffed, like wanting food.
It’s been known to go around, the man repeated.
The mother tried to smile, made little sounds. She sort of curtsied the way young girls used to when wearing dresses—the way she had on several occasions in the past though she could remember none of them specifically right now. The curtsy made her hips hurt. She cleared her throat and turned, as the man had, away, to face the window, fat with glare. She said something nice about the window’s size and the view through it—that bright light—the way she’d seen all the listing agents on those home shows do on the TV, as what could sell a house but a window.