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sunlight at all. He permitted himself to peek under the shoebox just once a day, and he did this now. Unlike the other two cups, there were no greening buds curling up out of the soil, and no spidery roots pressed against the underside of the cup. It had been an experiment he’d read about in one of his father’s science and nature books…
    From his bedroom window, he could see the open door of the detached garage, the multitude of junk heaped within. That had been his father’s junk; what purpose it served, Matthew Crawly had no idea. He didn’t think his mother had any idea either, though she did not appear to be in much of a hurry to dispose of it. In fact, it looked as though she had relocated the items to the higher shelves in preparation for last week’s storm, just as his father used to do when he still lived there. Matthew remembered being young, watching his father from this very window as his old man milled about in the yard, his denim-colored postal uniform dark with sweat, the shirt partially unbuttoned. He had watched his father smoke cigarettes beneath the garage’s awning then hurry across the yard to the house for dinner. Hugh Crawly had done this almost every night: smoked on the far side of the garage, where he thought he was hidden from everyone in the house. He’d slam the screen door just like Matthew did, and Matthew’s mother would yell at him, and his father would laugh his big-bellied laugh and that would be the end of it.
    It was the end, all right, Matthew thought now…and there was a part of him that was frightened by the depth of what that meant, and the maturity of the thought. Why had his father left? With all that big-bellied laughter, was he covering up for something? Had he just had too much and decided never to come back? Worse still, had it been something Matthew had done? Had it been his fault that his father had picked up in the middle of the night and disappeared? Matthew didn’t know. And quite often, like right now, he felt he didn’t want to know.
     
    4
     
    The dinner table was the only place the remainder of the Crawly family came together with any sort of regularity. It was a firm rule: no matter what your day and evening plans were, you had to be home for dinner. The only exception was when their mother had to work the dinner shift at the diner or if Brandy had an early babysitting gig. A few times Brandy had tried to weasel out of having dinner with the family so she could instead have dinner at a friend’s house or go to an early movie with some girls from school, but their mother had firmly put her foot down without so much as a discussion. “I don’t jockey around my shifts at the diner just to come home and have dinner at an empty table,” their mother was fond of saying. Matthew was only eleven, but he was not stupid. The dining ritual had been instituted right around the same time Hugh Crawly crept out and left them behind in the night. It was his mother’s way of making sure the remaining members of the Crawly household stayed together. Even at his unworldly age, Matthew felt a sense of sad desperation in his mother in knowing this.
    With a light rain pattering against the kitchen windows, the three of them sat at the table. A fourth chair remained at the table, loud as an explosion in its emptiness. A few times, when it was Matthew’s turn to set the table, he’d accidentally set a place for his father, too. Once, it had made his mother cry. She’d gone out on the porch to do it, but it was summer and all the windows had been open, and he had heard her sobbing in her muted, embarrassed way. It had hurt Matthew terribly to hear it and Brandy had called him an idiot as she cleared away the extra place setting.
    Matthew’s mother looked at him from across the table. Her face was too thin, her eyes like lusterless stones. She was still in her powder-blue waitress uniform, her name tag on her breast. Matthew could remember a time when he’d thought she