Keep This Quiet: Four minutes at the back of the car

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Saturday. The kitchen, seven in the evening.

The black sedan brought him up from the station at seven.

It did not honk. It set him down at the steps, then took its lights back down the hornbeams. He came in by the front door with nothing in his hands, which on him read as a day's work.

"There she is." He kissed her temple. He smelled of train, then of himself. "She's home. She took her own stairs one at a time. She wouldn't have my arm on a single one."

"Thank you for driving her."

"She's family." He hung his jacket. He pushed his sleeves up. Every drawer opened on the first try.

She cut what he handed her. The radio found its old songs. She waited for the day to come out of him, which it did the way everything came out of him, lightly, in the order he chose.

"We were waved down, by the way. A mile out. The turnout with the old trough."

Her knife kept its schedule.

"A deputy. He wanted to know what a nurse's car was doing on his road again with a man at the wheel. I told him whose guest she'd been. He was very sorry about it." He tasted, added salt. "He had a look at her through the glass. She gave him the face she gives me."

"Did he want anything?"

"A name. A reason. I had both."