He sighed and laughed a little himself. “No, I’m sorry. It just surprised me. She and I talked about it and agreed not to bring the kids to your house until you’re feeling 100% again. She did say she might stop by the hospital, though. And Brendan’s fine now, we just decided he should stay home so he could go see Mom. I just didn’t want her to take him to see you since you’re not back up to speed yet.”

“It was fine. He hung onto Shane the majority of the time anyway. I don’t think either of us caught anything from the other,” I said. “I miss Jason and Aiden, though.”

“I know, they miss you too. I’ll bring them by sometime soon, all right?”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll let you get back to work. But I’ll call you when Shane and Jenny get back,” I told him. We said goodbye, and after glancing at the clock and realizing it was close to four I decided to go get some juice.

I didn’t need to take my meds again this soon, but my head was killing me. That had always happened when the phone woke me up, and to this day I have no idea why. Alarm clocks didn’t do that, but the phone always did. Maybe it had something to do with the sort of natural fear that a phone rousing me out of sleep had instilled over the years since the kids had been born. I don’t know.

I got my juice and listened to the silence of the house. I didn’t like it. It felt too empty without Alice in it. Obviously we hadn’t spent every second together before, but it was almost as if the house knew something vital to its existence had been lost, and it was reacting accordingly. It seemed to me that even the walls were sad. As I had the thought, I realized how strange it was, but that didn’t make it go away.

After I’d had my juice I just sort of wandered the house for awhile, looking into the various rooms. Charlie’s old room had been turned into a room for the boys when they stayed, although they usually camped out with sleeping bags in the living room instead. Kallie had decided in high school that she wanted the basement to herself, and we’d switched her room and the guest room when she was a sophomore. It looked the same as it had for years. We’d changed the color scheme once, but it wasn’t much different. Still, most of our friends had wound up crashing in it at one time or another, and the kids’ friends had too. There were a lot of good memories there.