Long Drive Home by Will Allison Page A

ourselves to tell her our marriage was in trouble. I told Liz that would be an even worse lie.
    A few of the parents paused long enough in the crosswalk to say they were sorry to hear about Liz and me, or they hoped things worked out. It was awkward. Sara was about to become the only kid in her class whose parents weren’t together. I wanted to tell them what I’d told Helen, that it wouldn’t last, but they probably would have thought I was in denial, so I just said thanks. There wasn’t time for much else. The fact that I was busy doing my job made things easier for everyone.
    The apartment building’s elevator was out of order, so Sara glumly held the emergency exit open as I carried in boxes from the car, her voice echoing after me in the stairwell—“Do you really have to do this, Dad?”—every plea a pinprick in my heart. Then we went back to the house for more. My suitcase was still open on the bed, half packed. Chairman Meow was curled up inside.
    “Looks like you’ve got a stowaway,” Helen said.
    Sara lay down next to the suitcase. “He doesn’t want you to go. Or he wants to come with you. So you don’t get lonely.”
    I said I didn’t plan on getting lonely since I’d be seeing her every day. But she was suddenly fixated on having the Chairman become my roommate, so I packed up the cat food and litter box and put him into his carrier. He wasn’t mine to take—Liz and I had found him together, under the porch of our duplex in Cleveland Heights—but I could always bring him back if she wanted.
    Sara and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the apartment. The Chairman stayed in the carrier for a while before he worked up the nerve to explore, keeping low and close to the walls. I unpacked my clothes. Sara went through a bin of toys and games she was planning to keep there. We built a fort out of empty moving boxes. She heard a train coming and decided we were runaways. The people on the train were trying to put us in an orphanage, she said. We hid in the fort, then unfolded the sofa bed to make a bigger fort underneath. She said the runaways were starving and sent me out to find food. When I came back with a box of crackers, which was all I had, she said, “Are you and mom taking a time-out?”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    She said Lacy had said that sometimes when moms and dads weren’t getting along, they decided to take a break.
    “We’re not taking a break,” I said. “I just need a place to work.”
    “Well, when are you coming home?” she said, trying not to cry.
    The trying was what really got me. “Soon,” I said, hating myself for it. But Liz and I had agreed this would be our answer for as long as we could get away with it. She didn’t want to tell Sara it would be two years, and I couldn’t go behind her back and tell Sara otherwise.
    “A week?” she said.
    “Probably longer.”
    “A month?”
    “It’s hard to say.”
    She was holding a marker from her toy bin. She stabbed the back of my hand, hard, and crawled out of the fort. I went over to the window where she was standing and put my arms around her. Beyond the railroad tracks, next to a ball field, an ambulance was trying to get through traffic, but none of the cars were pulling over. The ambulance’s siren echoed back and forth across the field until it sounded like there were five or six of them. Sara looked at the red dot on my hand.
    “ ‘Soon’ isn’t a real answer,” she said. “ ‘Soon’ doesn’t mean anything.”
    Liz had said I shouldn’t meet her train anymore. She’d walk, or take the jitney, or drive herself. I’d said I had to bring Sarahome anyway, so why wouldn’t I be a decent future ex and pick her up?
    On the ride home, she put on a brave face for Sara. She asked how the move went and nodded along, too enthusiastically, as Sara told her what a big help she’d been.
    “But the window is painted shut,” Sara said. “And the toilet doesn’t flush all the way. I don’t think Dad