There is silence for a moment, cold and scary deep, like a glacial lake. Dolores remembers a day with Jay and Tommy on the water: Jay tossing Tommy in, and the seconds of Tommy not surfacing before his head burst back out, laughing. Jay laughing. Dolores unable to laugh.
“Thank you,” the woman says. “Thank you for saying that. You’re the only person who has said it.”
Dolores pats the bumper and says, “I’m here if you need to do this again.”
“No, I only needed to do this once,” the woman says. Dolores releases her wrist.
She stands up. “Thank you again,” she says, and walks decisively away, back down the road from which she came. Once the woman is gone, Dolores questions if she was ever really there.
She was. She certainly was.
For a minute longer Dolores sits in the ambulance. Night is coming, not falling but rising, the violet blue seeping upward from the tree line. Across the street a few kids are still playing in a blow-up pool. “Ok, ready?” the tallest one says. Together they hoist the pool sideways, the water rushing over the plastic walls, flooding a patch of backyard grass. Inside their house, the lights are on, the curtains open. Doors slam open and shut. A spatula scrapes against a pan. Plates clatter. Dolores watches the mother and father bickering inside the kitchen. They fight because they love, she thinks. Fight, fight, fight. One fight after another. Keep fighting. Fight for all that you have, no matter how little. Even a little bit of something is something.
She wonders what’s for dinner.