“Look out the window,” Fiona said from her highchair.
“Eat your cereal, honey,” Pendelton said. He didn’t say that he’d looked out the window eleven times already this morning.

Zoe was often late, but she usually called. He listened to the traffic reports on the radio, but no tieups or wrecks were spoken of.
“Just look, dad.”
To make her happy, he looked, just as Zoe’s little green Citroen was pulling into the driveway.
“It worked! It worked!” Fiona shouted, recognizing the sound of the car. She scrambled out of her highchair before Alan could even tell her mom was home.
“Mommy!” She beat him to the door.

Fiona hugged her mother’s legs and Zoe patted her on the head and gave Alan a passionate kiss at the same time. Then she handed him her car keys. “My bags are in the back,” she said. As he went out to the car to get her stuff, he heard Zoe telling Fiona she’d brought her something.

He looked at the sky. It was as grey as the neighbor’s house. He had a quiet day ahead of him. It was late in the morning, and he had nowhere to be until this afternoon, when he had to drive into Vienna for a rehearsal. He looked forward to relaxing, maybe sitting on the sofa with Zoe and hearing about her workshop that weekend, feigning interest.

Zoe met him at the door when he returned with her bags, and gave him another one of those kisses, and put her hand down his pants. Nice change from the chill in the past weeks, he thought. “Where’s Fiona?” he asked her.

“I want to fuck you, Alan Pendelton,” she said. “Fiona’s up in her room with her new toy I brought her. Let’s fuck right here. Let’s fuck right here in the kitchen.” She unzipped his pants and dragged him into the kitchen at the same time. He barely managed to drop her bags and close the kitchen door on their way in.

Alan let himself be pulled along by Zoe’s passion. Deep in the back of his mind her shuddery breaths and new roughness struck him as closer to desperation than heat, but he ignored that and concentrated on matters at hand.

At first he kept his back to the kitchen door in case Fiona should wander in, but he was soon carried along by Zoe’s enthusiasm and enjoying himself. Afterwards, they lay on the kitchen floor naked and gazed up at the ceiling. Alan was glad he’d cleaned the floor last night.

He played absently with her ear and noticed she was missing an earring. He raised his head and looked around the kitchen, in case it was on the floor somewhere. “What’s wrong?” she asked sleepily.

“You lost an earring,” he said.

She reached up and felt her ears. “I can get another one.”

He looked at the remaining earring. It was a long silver dangly earring with red stones, the first piece of jewelry he’d ever given her, but he said nothing. The ceiling was tongue and groove pine. He had put it up there himself. First he’d screwed one by two pine slats onto the brick ceiling, and then measured and cut the tongue and groove paneling and tacked it up to the slats with small nails. It had taken a full day.

Zoe was talking about her drive home. She said she’d stopped for coffee at a rest stop and service had been slow.

The first time Pendelton had sex, he’d been fifteen. He’d been out riding his bike on his way home from orchestra practice and bumped into a girl from school, Marcia. She was standing behind the bowling alley smoking with some older guys from school and asked him if he wanted a cigarette. He said okay. He coughed at first, and one of the older guys, who Pendelton assumed was fucking Marcia from the way he put his hands on her, laughed at him, and made a violinist joke, so Pendelton hit him. The kid fell to the ground with both hands still in the front pockets of his jeans.

Pendelton had learned how to do that on the hockey team. “Violence is on your side, Alan,” a kid named Doug had told him. “This is how you deck someone: either you don’t do anything, or you fucking deck them without thinking about it. You hit them hard, and with no warning. If you want to give them a chance, take up boxing.” Alan wasn’t a brutal person, but look: When you’re fifteen, it’s not easy to reconcile violin with hockey. Once he established a reputation as merciless – and he was wise enough to do it early – his teammates treated him with more respect.

Marcia had not decided yet what to do; she took a step back, and then another until she was leaning against the bowling alley wall watching the two boys. The other guy got up from the ground, rubbing his jaw, and said something about a lucky punch so Pendelton knocked him down a second time. At that point Alan noticed his cigarette had fallen to the ground. He was secretly relieved, because to be honest it was making him sick.

Marcia had been smoking with two boys. Alan had knocked down the larger of the two. The second one, also about seventeen but only Alan’s size, now started to make noises like he wanted to say something. Alan was shaking with adrenalin and he didn’t think he’d be able to get coherent words out yet, but he tried it.

“Take your friend home,” he said to the second kid. He and Marcia watched the two boys cross the parking lot and disappear around a pile of blackberry vines.

Marcia asked him to walk her home so he walked her home and at her house her parents were out so she invited him in and he had sex for the first time. He wasn’t a violent guy, but violence had not done him wrong, he thought.

Come to think of it, it had been his first cigarette too.

“I was worried about you,” he said to Zoe. “Normally you call. I’m not criticizing, I’m just saying.”

“Don’t ruin the moment,” she said. She stood up and dressed. “Can’t you just live in the moment?” she asked him. Upstairs, Fiona was yelling, “Mommy!”

The refrigerator clicked on and hummed. Zoe walked out of the room. The tile floor was warm on Pendelton’s naked ass where the hotwater pipes collected on their way from the radiators throughout the house to the furnace in the cellar. He had broken a hammer making that ceiling – he’d dropped it from the ladder and the wooden handle snapped off, cheap piece of junk. He wondered where Zoe’s second earring was.