"No, I don't Gabriele; and do you want me to tell you why?"
"Please. More than anything else on the planet, I live for it."
"Both of us had to do something while we waited and waited for you, didn't we? We couldn't stare at the door all night. Folk dancing to balalaika music seemed out of place and we didn't know the phone numbers of hospital morgues to see if you checked in with your bags."
She chortled. "Uh oh, facetious and angry. Looks like I've been grounded and will have the car keys taken away." But grave memories were flung into her consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so tacit and incommunicable.
"Do you want me to not care?"
"Huh?" She was recovering from damnable memories that were running over her the way swathes of the Earth's hardened vomit, continents, moved, reshaped themselves, and demarcated anew its body of water. Then it occurred to her what he said. "Sorry. I thank you for caring. I really do. You are a good guy."
"You left your son here all alone."
"Are you kidding? Hardly that! After hearing from Peggy about his penchant for arson, I wouldn't be that crazy. Where is the babysitter, Nathaniel?"
"I didn't like her so I got rid of her," said the boy. "I fired her but I paid her off first."
"With what?"