John Saul by Guardian Page B

hesitated, then shrugged helplessly. “Then we’ll see.”
    Alan opened his mouth to speak, but MaryAnne held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me any questions, and don’t ask for any more explanations of why I’m going. I don’t owe you any explanations at all, but you still owe me plenty.”
    By the time she got out of the car at the airport, she and Alan were, once more, barely speaking to each other.

 CHAPTER 4 
    “H ow come you and Mom keep fighting?”
    Alan emerged from the closet in the bedroom of the furnished apartment he’d rented after the break-up with Eileen Chandler, his three suits and a few shirts—still on their hangers—draped over his left arm. Though Alison appeared to be concentrating on packing his clothes into the battered suitcase on the bed, he could sense the tension in her body as she waited for his answer.
    “It just happens that way sometimes,” he said. And your mother’s being pigheaded about giving me another chance, he didn’t add, though the words were on the tip of his tongue.
    “Did Little Miss Blondie really kick you out?” Logan piped.
    “Logan,” Alison groaned. “You’re not supposed to call her that! We’re not even supposed to know that’s what Mom and Susan—” She clapped her hands over her mouth and turned to look at her father.
    “Little Miss Blondie?” Alan echoed, not certain whether to laugh or be angry at the appellation his wife had assigned to his former girlfriend. But then, seeing the fear of a blow-up in both his children’s eyes, he chuckled. “Well, Eileen
is
small, and she
is
blond, and she
is
still single, so I guess it fits, doesn’t it?” As the children relaxed, and he began laying the suits and shirts into the suitcase, he tried to dismiss his transgression with a shrug. “And I guess the whole thing was just a stupid mistake. Anyway, it’s over, and all I want to do now is make things right with your mother, and move back home so everything can be like it used to be.”
    “Then why don’t we just move all your stuff?” Logan suggested. “That way, when Mom comes home, you’ll already be there. I mean, you’re going to be there anyway, aren’t you?”
    Alan reached out and tousled his son’s hair. “I wish it were that simple,” he replied. But as he glanced around the dingy room he’d been sleeping in for almost a month, he began to wonder. Why not? September’s rent was almost due. It made far better sense simply to move out now, than to stay in this depressing place. The furniture in the living room, great sagging masses upholstered in some coarse green fabric that threatened to peel the skin off his fingers every time he touched it, should have been relegated to a Dumpster years ago, and the sagging bed wasn’t any better. There was no real kitchen—only a converted closet barely big enough for one person, in the living room, which he suspected had been the dining room of a much larger apartment, back when the building was new, decades ago.
    So why not just move back in? Even if MaryAnne kicked him out again when she got home, he could certainly find someplace better than this to stay until she came to her senses.
    Besides, hadn’t MaryAnne herself suggested it? What was he supposed to do for the next few days, come over here every time he needed something?
    “You know, you’re right, Logan,” he declared, his mind suddenly made up. “Let’s go down to the basement and find some boxes and pack everything up.”
    With the prospect of their father moving home permanently, the mood of both the children immediately lifted from the silent tension of the ride to and from the airport to one of noisy joy. Twenty minutes later the job was done, the few things Alan had acquired in the months since he’d walked out on MaryAnne barely filling two large cardboard cartons. After they’d stowed the two boxes and his suitcase in the car, Alan left a note for the manager, announcing that