The screen door had a habit of banging and he held the handle the whole way out, feeling the spring resist him, and then eased it shut like he was closing a bedroom door on a sleeping child. The bulb above the garage was burned out again. He'd bought a replacement three weeks ago and it was still in the plastic bag on the workbench.
The Delgados' yellow light made a little dome on the wet sidewalk and he stepped around it without thinking. Someone had left a sprinkler going in the dark, and the hiss of it followed him half a block before the sound gave out. He passed the house with the camper parked in the driveway, the one with the faded sticker on the bumper that said LAKE TEXOMA 1998 - and kept going.
He had counted the cracks once, as a kid, all the way to the stop sign - forty-one, or forty-two, he could never remember - and now his heel found one without looking and his body flinched like she'd said the word again. A dog behind a wooden fence tracked him without barking - just the click of its nails following him along the boards. He stopped at the corner where the streetlight had gone orange-dim, the kind of dim that meant it was almost done, and stood there with his hands in his pockets while a moth threw itself at the glass again and again and again.
The screen cracked across the bottom corner where he'd dropped it in the parking lot of a Valero six months ago, and the light from it came through that crack in a thin white line across his thumb. Her name at the top of the thread was still the one he'd typed in when they first got together - *mi amor*, two words - lowercase - and below it the question mark, and below that the screenshot, and the number the screenshot showed was $4,840 and he recognized the seventeen cents because seventeen cents was what was left of a twenty he'd broken for parking downtown the day he told her he was going to fix it. He stood there under the dead lamp on Pruitt and the moth from the last corner or a different moth found the crack in his screen and bumped against it once. His thumb hovered over the green bar at the bottom, the one that said *reply* - and the crack in the glass caught the light again and he just looked at it.
The light had taken him for a possum or a drunk and now it was gone and the street was just the street again, a crack of porch TV blue from somewhere down the block, a laugh track crossing the wet grass like it belonged there. He turned the phone face-up once, then face-down, and put it in his back pocket. His thumb had left a smear across the crack and he'd felt it go and hadn't wiped it. He started back toward the burned-out bulb and the bag on the workbench - and his heel found the same crack it always did, and this time his body didn't flinch.
The stone clicked once against the plastic aglet and went quiet, and he didn't reach down. The Delgados' yellow dome had shrunk to just the bulb itself, bare now, someone having cut the porch light and left only the socket burning. He came up his own walk and the sprinkler two streets over had stopped - or he had walked far enough that it couldn't follow him anymore. He picked up the plastic bag from the workbench without turning on any light and carried it outside and stood under the dead bulb with the new one in his hand.
He set the dead bulb on the railing instead of putting it in the bag, and it sat there, still warm. The spring on the screen door had gone quiet behind him. He took out his phone, and the crack in the glass caught the garage light, and his thumb found her name without looking - and he pressed it.
The ringing stopped and the breathing came and he said her name once, just the two syllables, and a june bug dropped off the eave and hit the railing an inch from the warm bulb and neither of them said anything about it. The crack in his screen had gone dark now, the garage light not reaching it from that angle. He heard, on her end - the sound of a drawer sliding open and then the small click of it closing again, the one in the kitchen, the one that stuck.
She asked him to hold on and he heard her set the phone face-down on something hard, a counter or a table, and the sound of it was the same sound it had always been - the same flat knock, and he stood there with the new bulb still in his hand and the dead one still on the railing and the june bug gone somewhere into the dark. The bag the bulb had come in lifted once off the workbench in a breath of air from somewhere and settled again. He shifted the phone to his other ear and reached out and picked up the dead bulb, still warm, and turned it in his fingers the way you'd turn a thing you weren't sure was broken, and then her voice came back.
He heard her cross the kitchen in the two steps it took to cross that kitchen - and a chair leg scraped the tile, and he knew without seeing it that she'd sat down at the table with the wobble they'd meant to fix since April. The dead bulb was smooth against his palm and he set it down gently beside the bag, not in it. On her end a cabinet swung open and he heard the small knock of a mug being lifted off its hook, the ceramic one with the chipped handle that he'd glued back twice, and the silence that came after it was the kind that wanted filling. He opened his mouth and the june bug hit the new bulb in his other hand once - hard, and bounced away into the yard, and he started talking.
He talked for a long time and then stopped and the line held and through it he heard her set the mug down on the wobble table and the table gave its small answer, the same quarter-inch rock it always gave. The new bulb was still in his hand and he reached up and threaded it in, just the first turn - not enough to light, just enough to hold. The plastic bag lifted again off the workbench and this time skated off the edge and he didn't catch it. On her end, the drawer in the kitchen slid open once more and she took something out of it, and whatever it was she set it on the table without a word, and he heard it land.
