Free Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan

her pockets for her keys and then hold them up to the moon to find the right one, and then when she opened the hatch the bags fell out onto the grass. She threw Sarah’s purple one aside and shoved the others in, reached up and slammed the hatch down before they could escape again, then headed for the house, sure that all this time Ken and Arlene were watching her.
    â€œHere,” she said to Sarah in the bathroom, and Sarah thanked her mousily, as if she might yell at her. “Don’t give me that face, all right? I’ve just driven twelve hours by myself so we could be here with your cousins.”
    Sarah’s face changed to one Meg was too familiar with lately, the pinched lips and downcast glare, and while she now regretted saying anything, she couldn’t let this pass. “Just stop with the attitude. You keep this up, it’s going to be a long week for both of us, and I don’t know about you, but that is not what I came here for.”
    She left her there at the sink, mad at herself. They were both tired. Christ, she was trying to do her a favor. She hadn’t driven this far since college, but that meant nothing to Sarah. In Sarah’s eyes, every fight they had was between the two of them alone, a bare contest of wills fought in a stone ring on some sand-swept plain like in her sword and sorcery books. In Sarah’s eyes, Meg was sure, she was always the one who attacked first, as if she carefully plotted each ambush, leaving Sarah no choice but to defend herself.
    Downstairs, Ken had brought all the bags in, which meant she’d have to take them upstairs or hear about it tomorrow morning. She did not want to start things with her mother like that. Already she would have to explain why she was so late, and though she’d had five hundred miles to come up with an answer, she didn’t have one. The truth would not do. She was prepared to tell her mother about the divorce—expected, maybe even welcome news, after all the back-and-forth—but she couldn’t say she spent the morning in a pointless, informal three-hour meeting, and that it had ended nastily, with Jeff’s lawyer threatening to bring up not just her years in therapy but her rehab, and that later her own lawyer—the woman she was paying good money to fight for her—advised her to take the settlement and give Jeff the visitation he wanted, and that she had cried in a stall in the women’s room, her face hot in her hands, because she knew she would lose the house and they would have to move, and the kids would have to start over in another school district because they couldn’t afford Silver Hills anymore. Her mother did not need to know all that.
    Ken helped her take the bags up while Arlene stood at the bottom of the stairs, supervising. He looked good, still trim, his hair receding but not gone dry and flyaway like their father’s. As a girl she’d envied Ken his natural wave, his eyelashes, yet he’d never been vain. He seemed, in his own stumbling, oblivious way, incredibly lucky. She supposed it would always be like that: there were people who things just worked out for, and there were people for who things didn’t, no matter how hard they tried.
    â€œI’m going to turn in,” Arlene said when they were finished. “I just wanted to make sure you got in okay.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œAll right, sweet dreams,” Arlene said, and she and Ken echoed her.
    They went into the kitchen so they wouldn’t wake anyone up. Ken turned off the outside spotlight, and the van disappeared. “You want a soda or something?” he asked, opening the fridge.
    â€œNo, I should be getting to bed. It’s a long drive by yourself.”
    â€œI’m sure. How are things?”
    He asked it so casually, closing the door, that she was tempted to say okay, they’re fine.
    â€œAwful,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Did you tell Mom