The mug sat wedged in the cupholder, lid cracked along the rim where he'd dropped it in the parking garage that Tuesday. He kept meaning to run it through the dishwasher. The crack had turned brown at the edges the way grout does, and he'd started pressing his thumb against it at red lights without noticing he was doing it.
He kept the radio on the classical station because nobody in his house ever wanted classical. The cornfields pressed up to the shoulder, and his headlights caught the silk at the top of the stalks going silver for a second before the dark took it back. He drove with one hand and with the other he rolled the window down two inches, just enough to hear the night - then rolled it back up.
The purple crayon rolled into the door panel and he reached down and picked it up without thinking, turned it in his fingers, set it on the dash. The wax had a tooth mark near the paper label - not his. He left his turn signal on for a quarter mile past the Meijer before he noticed, and even then he didn't turn.
The screen said JENNY and threw a white rectangle across the buckled seat belt. He watched the cornfield. The rectangle shrank to nothing. It came back - JENNY again, then a bell - the reminder he'd typed himself at 7 a.
He put his hand on the gear shift and left it there. The kitchen window was a yellow square and his daughter moved through it once, twice, holding something flat against her chest - a book, maybe, or the lid to something. The grocery bag had gone cool through the paper. He counted the slats in the garage door - got to eleven, stopped.
He set the bag down and the soup container shifted and knocked against the counter edge. The crayon came out with his hand when he pulled it from his pocket - he hadn't known it was there - and it hit the tile and rolled until the refrigerator stopped it. He crouched and worked it out with two fingers, stood, and dropped it in the junk drawer next to the dead batteries and the twist ties, and pushed the drawer shut with his hip.
