She came to bed with her socks on. It was never a good sign and it only happened when she was too angry to bother with them after the shower.

"Don't," she said.

"I'm not doin' anything."

"You're about to try to fix it."

"I've got nothing. I don't even know what happened yet."

She lay stiff as a board beside him and he kept his hands to himself and studied the ceiling. It went on longer than he expected. Then it came out of her all at once and it had no bottom to it, the meeting, and what Dale said, and how Dale had looked around the table afterward to see who was enjoying it, and how she had gotten into her truck in the parking lot and sat there a long while with the keys in her lap.

He said yeah twice and nothing else.

Nineteen years had taught him that the story would come around again, and that the third telling was the true one, and that whatever she was actually grieving would not show itself until she had worn the anger down far enough to get underneath it.

She came to her mother and her voice went thin and then it quit on her altogether.

"Say something."

"They're wrong about you."

"That's it? That's all you've got?"

"That's all I got."

She made a noise that was half a laugh and half the other thing and got a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and there was nothing gentle in it. She kissed him the same way she had been arguing. He let her. The one thing he had learned in nineteen years was to keep from slowing her down to ask whether she was all right.

"Take the socks off," he said.

"No."

"Take 'em off."

"They stay."

She got up over him and her hair came down in her eyes and she pushed it back twice and then let it be. The bed made the noise the bed made. The dog got off the foot of it, offended, and clicked away down the hall.

She was going too fast, the way she did when she was trying to get out ahead of the day, and he put his hands on her hips and brought her down to nothing and kept her there. She swore at him. He kept her there. She swore at him again with less behind it and then quit, and after a while her breathing changed, and it stopped being about Dale.

"Hey," he said.

"What."

"Nothing. Hey."

She looked at him, and whatever she found there brought her down onto him, and she put her head alongside his and stayed, moving, saying nothing, and the crying got in with the rest of it and neither one of them made any effort to separate the two.

Afterward she lay across him with her leg over his hip and one hand on his chest and the other sock half off.

"I'm gonna say somethin' to Dale on Monday."

"Okay."

"You think I shouldn't."

"I think Dale ought to get his affairs in order."

She laughed into his shirt. He got up and brought her water and she drank half of it and set the glass on the floor because the nightstand was too far, and she talked about her sister's bathroom, of all things, and then about her mother again, quieter, and then she stopped talking.

He lay there a long time with his hand in her hair.

Nineteen years. At twenty-five he would have gone downstairs afterward and checked his messages, or found some reason to be out of the house, because what she had said about her mother had nowhere to go in him and he could not stand to be in the bed with it. He did that to a woman once for two years. She left him over it. She was right to.

The sock came off in the night and turned up under the covers in the morning and she blamed him for it.