Free Songs Without Words by Ann Packer Page B

the trunk, he thought again of Lauren at breakfast: hair hanging by her face, shoulders rounded. And the sound of her chair falling backward, wood banging against wood. It almost scared him, how much he wanted her to snap out of it—whatever “it” was. This moodiness that took over.
    Through dinner he kept an eye on her. She was placid, and Liz had whispered, before the kids came into the kitchen, that she’d cleaned out her closet during the afternoon, filling three garbage bags before she was finished—a good sign, Brody thought.
    After dinner the kids went upstairs to do homework, and he and Liz sat in front of the TV. There was a news report on, and they stared silently at the footage from Iraq: charred vehicles, cloth-draped bodies, bloody children.
    “Turn it off,” Liz said, and he pointed the remote at the screen and killed the picture.
    “I’m weak,” she said.
    “It’s upsetting.”
    “I feel like I should be able to watch.”
    “Honey.” He moved closer and put his arm around her, and after a moment she leaned into him. She smelled a little of shampoo, a little of the lasagne she’d served for dinner.
    She said, “I got started on the bench this afternoon.”
    He pulled away to look at her. “Yeah? How’s it going?”
    “It doesn’t really look like anything yet. I was priming it, and Lauren came in and said, ‘How sweet. You can put it outside at Christmastime and pretend it got snowed on.’”
    “She did?”
    “She was just kidding.”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “It was fine,” she said, patting his leg. “It was nothing.”
    He sat still for a moment, thinking there was more to say but also that he didn’t want to argue. He didn’t even know what the argument was. He reached for the remote and turned the TV on again. He surfed until he found
Law and Order,
or maybe one of its clones. He remembered David Leventhal once saying that the ABA was going to have to sue NBC for libel; litigation wasn’t nearly as interesting as the show made it out to be, but applications were up at law schools all over the country, and as a result the economics of the entire enterprise had been placed in peril.
    He lowered the volume and turned to Liz again. “Do anything else?”
    “Visited my parents. They can’t wait to show you their Egypt pictures.”
    He smiled.
    “And I talked to Sarabeth—she’s going to a gamelan concert tonight.”
    Sarabeth was always doing something just a little hipper than anything he and Liz would do on their own, and every third or fourth time Liz would get a bee in her bonnet and they’d end up at some warehouse in Alameda, watching naked people write on one another or something. On the plus side, it gave him some great stories for work.
    “You know those Indonesian chimes?” she said. “And gongs?”
    “Yeah, yeah.” He reached for her hand, interlacing their fingers. “Sounds like fun. Hey, I was thinking about the city today. About walking home from work.”
    “Nostalgia?” she said.
    “No, I was remembering the foghorns.”
    “Sounds like nostalgia to me.”
    He swung his legs onto the coffee table and leaned back. Thinking of those days, of the guy he’d been: what a striver, what a go-getter. That guy never could have imagined this life. What had that guy wanted? To be sharp, aggressive, confident, canny, smooth. To be Russ.
    There were footsteps on the stairs, and Joe came in, twiddling a pencil between his fingers. At dinner he’d still been amped up from soccer practice, but he looked tired now. Brody liked it that Joe had practice on Tuesdays this year—his own tennis day. He figured Joe’s legs felt the same way his did.
    “Hey, bud,” he said to Joe.
    “I’m starving.”
    Liz pulled her hand free from Brody’s and scooted forward. “Want some more lasagne? I can heat some up for you.”
    Joe thought for a moment. “Nah.” He went into the kitchen for a box of crackers and brought them to an easy chair near the couch. He stood to one