Conversations in Fluorescent Light

The clock above the consultation window read 2:43 a.m.

The overhead lighting was not white; it was an aggressive, vibrating bluish-gray that made every vein under the skin look like a pencil mark. In aisle four, between the pediatric cough syrup and the discounted heating pads, David was holding a box of saline nasal mist like an exhibit in a trial.

Claire stood three feet away, her hands wedged into the pockets of an oversized down jacket she had grabbed from the hall hook on her way out the door.

"You didn't have to come in," David said. "You could have stayed in the car."

"The heater in the car only works when the engine is above two thousand rpm," she said. "I was freezing."

"You could have kept the engine running."

"I just told you. It only blows warm air when it's moving."

David turned the box around. The instructions were printed in four languages. "Did she have a fever when you checked at midnight?"

"Thirty-eight point two," Claire said. "I gave her the children's drops. She slept until two, then she started crying because her throat felt like sand."

"You should have called me before midnight."

"You were at the warehouse until one, David. What were you going to do from thirty miles away? Send a thought?"

A young man in a neon safety vest walked past, pushing a mop bucket on yellow wheels. The smell of diluted pine cleaner rose between them, chemical and sharp. Both stepped back to let the man pass, nodding politely as if they were patrons in an art gallery avoiding someone stepping backward.

"I would have left earlier," David said when the wheels had squeaked away toward the greeting card section.

"No, you wouldn't."

"Claire."

"You wouldn't have left earlier because you needed to finish inventory. You always need to finish inventory. The company doesn't even dock your pay if you leave at eleven, but you stay because it's easier to count cardboard boxes than to come home to a room where a four-year-old is vomiting into a plastic bowl."

David set the nasal mist down on the metal shelf. The package made a small clatter against the price tag rail.

"That's not fair," he said.

"It isn't fair," she agreed. "None of it is fair. But you don't get credit for coming here at a quarter to three in the morning to buy twenty dollars worth of saline when you weren't there at eight o'clock to read the story she had been waiting for all week."

David looked down at his boots. The leather at the toes was scuffed down to the gray fiber beneath the polish. He had spent eight hours standing on concrete. His lumbar spine was burning with a dull, thumping ache that had begun three weeks ago and hadn't relented.

"I thought we were doing this together," he said.

Claire looked at him. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her hair pulled back into an elastic band that was coming undone near her left temple. For a moment, the anger went out of her face, replaced by something much worse: an exhausting, clinical pity.

"We are doing it together," she said. "That's why it's so hard."

She picked up the nasal mist, added a package of honey throat lozenges from the rack beside it, and walked toward the lone open cash register at the front of the store. David waited five seconds, took a breath of the cold pine air, and followed her.