with a wanting: to get up from her place and circle the table, put her arms around her mother, her lovely mother, for letting slights pass unremarked on. Around her father, so dependably there under the blue cotton of his shirt, under the sheen the overhead light cast on the curve of scalp where his hair had thinned, for his assumption that she would accompany them on tonight’s trip, his strong kindness, his readiness to make things okay. Around Robbie, who sat chewing at a hunk of bread that he had already fished from the basket, his constant hunger hanging off him like a logo, the bones of his smooth jaw popping audibly as if to egg him on. These moments came. It was hard for her body to know how to contain them when they did come. They felt like a breaking. It had occurred to her before that this was all she needed, that any other kind of love existed for people who didn’t have this.
“How were the kids today, Knoxie,” her mother asked. “I need to talk about something else, otherwise I get too nervous.”
“They were good,” Knox said, determined to convey what she felt through her voice, through her talk. She sat up straighter. “Some of them are improving so much. I want to bring a group of them out to the farm before summer school’s over. Let them roam around a little bit.”
“Ned could show them around the stallion complex,” her mother said. “That’s an idea.”
“Or they could come to the foaling barn,” Robbie said. “We could use a little excitement over there. All we do is stand around and sweat and translate dirty jokes from Spanish into English.”
“That’s nice,” her father said. Knox laughed, though she noticed that her father regarded Robbie with a grim expression for half a beat before he looked at Knox and smiled. She knew that Robbie could push the apathetic student act far enough to worry her father, who had made a bid for a small part of the farm acreage—acreage that now spread for two miles on either side of the road—the week after he graduated from college. “I think you should bring them out,” he said. “Call over to the office and have them set it up.”
“I can just tell Ned,” Knox said.
“I asked him to stay for dinner, but he said he couldn’t,” her mother said.
“I know,” Knox said. She made a note to call him later, if only to register herself in his thoughts. She would call his machine, become a voice that played through the rooms of his house as he walked through them later, his boots weighing on the old boards.
“The sexiest man alive is the star of a popular television show. He’s from Ohio,” Robbie said.
“Who,” Knox said.
“You can’t give up, you have to guess who it is.”
“Maybe we should go over our options,” her father said. “We should decide what the plan is, don’t you think?”
Knox’s mother got up from the table and went to the refrigerator. She opened the door, bent forward at the waist, reached in, pushed several cartons and bottles to one side, then the other. “Would anyone like butter with their bread,” she asked.
“I would,” Knox said, though she didn’t usually take butter. It was easy to abandon whatever preferences she had when her parents cooked for her—or to forget, temporarily, exactly what those preferences were. During breakfasts at this table, to which she came as often as not on weekend mornings, she drank cup after cup of coffee simply because it was on offer, and left feeling heavy and unmoored at once, as if she might float out of the top of her head if it weren’t so leaden. She walked home, nodding like a narcoleptic, and crawled into bed, wondering why she hadn’t refused something—that last piece of bacon, the cluster of grapes that her father had clipped for her with a pair of kitchen shears. Now she slathered butter on a piece of crust, and listened.
“Do we all fly up tonight, or do just Mom and I go, or what,” her father was saying. “That’s what I’m going to need to know. If this was a month from now, I’m guessing we would descend on Charlotte in shifts, but since we’re all together—”
“Can I say something?” her mother said.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I just think it’s a lot for the two of them, with the whole family all at once. We should wait and see what