#present tense

She is in the car next to him. She is thinking about her sister. Reflexively. Her sister, who is not speaking to her, who has not spoken to her for two weeks now, though Mel continues to barter for her care, to make phone calls on her behalf, to make sure she is stocked up on those fig bars she likes and, God help her, a steady supply of condoms.

(Mel does not believe in God any longer but at times His name still comes up in her vernacular.)

Becca will not get pregnant. Becca will not get pregnant for a multitude of reasons, but chief among them is that Mel will not allow it. Becca is her sister, but Mel is also her parent, and therein lies the problem, the fissure, the reason they have not spoken in two weeks. She cannot be both things. In trying, she has done damage to them both.

She never meant to hurt her, which is, Mel supposes, what every abuser says.

Meanwhile, Langdon turns the volume up, up, up, so loud the vibrations lick her knees. Sad white boy divorce songs. They are good, really, and he has a good voice. Of course he has a good voice. The universe is not fair. He looks the way he does and he also croons like an angel. He tells her to join in and she says she does not know the words, which is the truth. Their taste in music does not align so neatly.

The air in the car is warm and milky, the surfaces slightly sticky, as in all harried parents’ cars. Evidence of Penny and Tanner lays on the floorboard between Mel’s feet, in the gap between the seats: toys, wrappers, crumbs, the happy litter of children.

Tanner and Penny. How they make her heart soar. Mel does not think it is normal to love a coworker’s children, but they have endeared themselves to her as only children can: easily, without effort.

Penny speaks to her of bugs, of insects, and brings her live ones, gesturing for Mel to hold out her hands. Mel does. She holds out her hands as carefully as she would handle a patient, because to Penny these are patients: the pill bug, the grasshopper, the spider — that one scared her — each sitting docile on the surface of her skin. Mel tells Penny what she knows about each one, which is not much, but she is learning. She has bought a book on insects just for her.

“That’s a katydid,” Mel says.

“Caddydid,” Penny says back.

Caddydid.

Getting through to Tanner is harder than getting through to Penny, who reminds Mel of herself: the glasses, the way Penny pushes them up her nose, always slipping, always being adjusted. It will be a lifelong habit. Tanner is, Mel supposes, the carbon copy of Langdon: the chin divot, the lean, stretched-out figure of a child perpetually in a growth spurt. Like Langdon he is always moving, and like Langdon he is always trying, and succeeding, at making her smile. He begs her to play tag and then pulls Mel up by the hands, and he is just about strong enough, at six, to move her.

Mel is lonely and knows Langdon is lonely too, and that is why he offered to carpool. She thinks they are friends, but she is scared to ask, in case asking stunts the seeds of whatever it is they are cultivating. It is probably better not to name it. Naming things puts them into boxes, into categories, and whatever exists between them seems misshapen for any of the usual ones: colleagues, friends, people who spend thirty minutes together in the car each morning and then eight hours together in the hospital after that. One would think they would get tired of each other, but so far they have not. At least Mel has not. She does not think she has ever grown tired of a person. It is other people who grow tired of her.

The music dims, and Langdon stops singing, and Mel prepares herself for whatever dumb joke he is about to tell. He will tell it on the pretense that he is testing jokes out for Tanner and Penny, and maybe that is how this started, but Mel knows it is not, at this point, what it is about.

“Why did the window go to the doctor?” he says.

Mel waits.

“It had a lot of pane.”

This one she gets immediately, and she laughs. Yes, she laughs. Anyone would laugh, sitting passenger-side, at this charming wreck of a man.

**

Langdon says something and pulls Mel out of the ritual of recounting the day and its mistakes. He is asking if she wants to get food on the way home. The kids are with Abby, and he has not been to the grocery store in who knows how long. Mel nods yes, of course, even though the prospect of eating in a crowded restaurant makes her skin want to peel back from the fascia. She wants to spend time with him enough that even the skin-peeling seems a fair price to pay.

He asks if she knows any good places, and she says no, because truthfully the only ones she knows well are Burger King, which Becca likes, and a little overpriced tea shop, which Mel likes. She and Becca go to both so often the staff know their names and their orders — their orders are always the same — and the staff smile and chat with them in a friendly way. Mel knows they are paid to be friendly, but they seem to like them.

Once Mel mentioned she was a doctor, necessary because the front of her shirt glistened with other people’s blood. The barista gasped and said, “Wow. That’s great. You’re doing something real. You stop people from dying.”

Mel swallowed because she thought the same of him, that making people bubble tea was probably, in the aggregate, as much of a kindness as what she did in the ER, and because often she did not stop people from dying. She would like to think she prolongs people’s lives, but during this particular week, prolonging life felt like another way to say prolonging suffering.

She wants to ask Langdon what he thinks and decides that, over dinner, she will. She will ask for his opinion, and she knows he will give it to her — his actual opinion — because that is the rule of their arrangement: they do not lie to each other. So far it has served them well.

Now they are not heading to Mel’s apartment, which is fine, because the heat is not working and when she gets home she will have to walk, in a blanket, like a cocooned insect, from room to room. They are heading to the restaurant he suggested, a Mexican place. Mexican food is as good to Mel as anything else. The tortilla chips she can eat, at least.

**

Now she and Langdon are driving back from the restaurant and comfortably full, Mel from endless tortilla chips and Langdon from cheese-smothered enchiladas. He asked if she would try a bite, and she said yes because they looked palatable and because she wanted to impress him and because maybe, disgustingly, she wanted her mouth to touch the fork where his mouth had been.

Desire, even softly felt, has turned her into a thing without shame.

Desire. Yes, Mel feels desire for him. She will admit it. Or maybe she wants what he represents: the promise of not being alone. With him she is not alone. She is filled up. Overwhelmingly so.

She sits back in the seat, his seat, taking her glasses off and rubbing the rheum from her eyes, feeling the little hollows where the frames, pushed against her face all day, have left marks.

Langdon is playing music again, more divorced-dad rock. It could easily be overwhelming — the thrum in her eardrums, Langdon’s drawl peeking through the chorus, the car windows down, wind touching her cheeks, her hair, his glance toward her when the song ends: “Ten out of ten, Mel, right?” — but in a good way. Before him, she did not know overwhelming could be good.

He is itching for conversation, his hands bouncing on the wheel, so at the intersection they discuss the day’s cases. Mel brings up her patient with septicemia, and although she sometimes avoids eye contact with Langdon on these drives, like she is doing now, she can tell he is empathetic. He exudes empathy. He says going to rehab changed him, but Mel thinks the answer is more subtle: rehab may have rearranged his priorities, but they had to be there in the first place. The law of conservation of mass. Lavoisier, she thinks. Not Einstein.