When the father got home from work that morning, the mother was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the counter on a tall stool with her legs crossed and her back toward the door. He seemed to not have seen her in months, or years. The father knew the mother would not believe his explanation that the streets were getting longer. He’d been getting up earlier and earlier to make it to his desk on time and his desk kept getting smaller and he kept getting home later and later and his fingernails kept growing. The last several nights the father felt sure that he’d come home, gone upstairs, taken off his clothes, gone to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, gotten into bed on one side—he had not noticed the presence or absence of his wife—rolled over on his side, gotten out of the bed on the other side, gone to the bathroom, splashed his face again, put on the same clothes, walked out the door. It took several full tanks of gas to get to work and back. The father had clocked the distance on his odometer and it always stayed the same.
That night on the way home he’d stopped and eaten books at a restaurant he’d never seen. The restaurant was next to another building he felt sure he recognized, as it had an unusual shape. He knew the second he saw the restaurant that he would eat there. He’d given up on trying to make it home in time for family dinner. He was so motherfucking goddamn hungry. The restaurant had no sign. The tacos were delicious, the best he’d ever had. He couldn’t even think of how a person could make a taco that tasted like these—they seemed to contain the pleasure of a whole meal in every bite. In each bite of the taco the father tasted steak and onions, ranch dressing, chocolate cake, bananas, gummy spiders, rum, and Cheetos. Those things all together tasted somehow very good. He’d ordered extra to bring the mother some so she could try them but after a while in the car he’d gotten hungry and he’d eaten them and he felt awful and too full, but would have done it again given the opportunity—given even thirteen hundred complimentary tacos, he would have eaten every one. The father had a new favorite place to eat and he planned to keep it to himself.
The father was walking up behind the mother. He moved slow, trying to be quiet, though he knew she knew that he was there. He found himself walking on his tiptoes, slow and lurching, like a man who’d come to kill. The father put both hands across his mouth to keep from giggling. His teeth bit at his one hand and he was bleeding and the blood was in his mouth.
The mother at the counter hunched and cringed with the father’s every step. She felt afraid—afraid not for the father’s silent acting, though she could sense it, but because the couple had made an offer and she didn’t know what he would think. The phone had begun ringing almost as soon as she’d closed the door behind them. Within the hour a contract had been delivered in a black envelope by a private courier who appeared to have approached the house on foot. They’d offered the full asking price, in paper money. Afterward, the mother felt so cold. She put on as many layers as she could manage, the oldest clothes stuffed in her drawers—dresses, shirts, pants, shoes she hadn’t worn in ages—back before she became pregnant with the child. With so many layers laid around her she could hardly move her arms or legs, her body, heat amassing in her thighs, so large, though inside her, at the center, her stomach roared.
Behind, the father moved closer and still closer. The father’s mouth drooled, overflowing. He had his hands worked into weapons. He closed his eyes.
When the father reached the mother he put his head square in the center of the mother’s back. He pressed with his forehead in a way that made the mother’s muscles stiffen, through the fabrics. They hung there slightly humming, their two bodies perpendicularly aligned.
Without turning to look at him, without surprise, the mother lifted the offer paper off the counter. She read it softly to the husband like a bedtime story, her voice rather raspy and unconcerned, feeling the sulk and burn of coming crying making her whole throat run with slush. The father’s body tensed against her as she spoke the couple’s offer’s words, the formal language. The mother felt the father remove his head and stand straight up. There was a grubby guzzling sound then, as if inside him the father were compacting trash.
The father reached across the mother’s shoulder and took the contract from her hand.
In the smallish light there in the kitchen for a minute the father seemed to stare straight through the paper. If he had seen through the paper, the father might have seen a person at the window. The father’s hands were shaking. He found himself already holding a pen, the logo of the place where he’d eaten dinner kissed upon it. The father moved to press the paper flat against the mother’s back.
Through her flesh the mother felt the father sign a name—not quite his name, she could feel that—the loop of lines and dots and holes went on so long.
The father crossed the other name out and tried again. He signed another, this one in big block letters that more resembled hieroglyphics. The father barked. The father’s hand was cramped and jiggling and he could not hold it still. With his free hand he gripped the wrist of the one he used for writing and in long forced crooked half-strokes he this time finally felt his hand scrawl out his given name, syllables for years he had been stalked by, concentrating, pressing hard, causing small hash marks on the mother’s skin, and underneath, the vessels breaking, giving blood.
When he looked again, it still was not what he’d intended. He’d made a mess of rods and dots, some of it written not upon the paper, but the mother’s clothing, and through the layers, on her skin. He looked and looked at what he’d written.
That really is my name, he said aloud. His voice was soapy, like a car wash.
He put the pen down and closed his eyes and moved and heaved the mother from the stool, into his arms.