Vincent looked at the rabbit.
“Was that him?”
“No. He’s the engineer.”
For twenty minutes, they argued about the investigation into the failed mission.
I left them to it.
From the landing, I heard Oliver laugh.
The suitcase stayed open until bedtime.
Then he put the animals away.
He needed no ceremony to reclaim the object.
He was allowed to use it for something ridiculous.
Near the end of that month, he asked his father whether adults could practice listening.
Vincent looked up from the breakfast dishes.
“I think so.”
“Like I practice things?”
“Yes.”
Oliver considered him.
“You used to do your face.”
“What face?”
The boy demonstrated.
A quick glance toward the door.
A tight smile.
A small nod that meant somebody should hurry.
I recognized it.
So did Vincent.
He put down the plate.
“I did.”
“June doesn’t.”
“Sometimes I do,” I said from the table.
Oliver thought.
“Not the same.”
Vincent crouched beside him.
“Does it make talking harder when I look impatient?”
The boy nodded.
His father didn’t ask him to prove it with an example.
He didn’t say the expression meant something different inside his own head.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Oliver looked relieved.
Then he asked whether they could have toast.
They could.
The conversation ended without a promise that Vincent would never make the face again.
But afterward, I noticed him catch himself.
Put down the phone.
Turn back.
Stay.
His son noticed too.
He sometimes pointed directly at his father’s eyebrows.
It became a private signal.
A useful one.
And occasionally, when Vincent exaggerated the expression deliberately during a story about an impatient king, it made Oliver laugh.
