When her son walked into their townhouse, Zach’s darkb-rown curls shielded his eyes. It wasn’t the first time Stephanie thought the deflection looked intentional, but she hadn’t yet found evidence that her son’s aloofness hid anything significant. She resisted giving him a hug.
His phone dinged with a soft melody she’d not heard before, one that didn’t match the hard-rock beats he usually assigned to the few callers he had. He looked at the screen, swiped the face of his phone, and shook his bangs out of his eyes. The thick curls settled back into place.
“Hey, there,” Stephanie said. “Who was that?”
“Nobody,” he said before he brushed past her and into the small kitchen.
Zach pulled down the coffee mug his father used to love, the white one stained with gray veins at the bottom, a picture of a fading eagle across the curved surface. Seasoned, his father called it. Dirty, Zach used to believe. But things change, and it had become the only thing he’d drink out of since his father had left for Afghanistan three months before.
“Are you ready for the SAT?” she asked.
The faucet sputtered before providing a steady stream to fill the cup. Zach never tested the water before drinking it, never added ice or heated it up. Stephanie had never been so accepting. She always wanted the water to be just right. Her husband called her Goldilocks. Zach didn’t even assess the water before brushing his teeth.
“Your English teacher emailed me. What’s her name again?”
Her son’s mouth curled into a little smile. At least Stephanie thought it did.
Zach twitched, his left shoulder rising up. “What did Meg want?”
“You call her Meg?”
“She says she’s too young to be called Mrs. What did she want?”
“You were supposed to meet with her but didn’t show up, so she was worried.”
Zach shook his head, pushed back his shoulders, priming himself for something—a fight maybe. After a long, slow drink, he set the cup down a little too hard on the table.
There was a time that she could read every tell about her son, the way he twisted his foot when he knew the answer to his question would be a no even if he desperately hoped for a yes. The question, “Can we please get a dachshund?” nearly left a bare patch on the thinning carpet outside her bathroom door. Another tell: the way he stood too close to her, sometimes holding her hand, when he wanted the answer to be no. “Are we moving again?”
Now she had to rely on instinct. She wished her husband weren’t thousands
