***

We get back to our hotel room, pay the babysitter, and I walk over to the kids who are asleep and somehow taking up the entire king size bed. David topples in sections onto the couch. He reaches up and loosens his tie, then lets his arm fall to the carpet.

I climb on top of him.

He slides around onto his back.

“Are the kids that fast asleep?”

“Oh sweetie,” I say, “it’s close to midnight. I don’t think I’d make it through.”

“I want to want to,” he says.

I kiss him, and he slides his fingers through my hair to the back of my head.

“We need a babysitter at like eleven in the morning,” I say.

“After coffee,” he says. “Before lunch. That’d be perfect. I’m very energetic mid-mornings.”

He stays on the couch and for the first half of the night I sleep across the foot of the bed so that I don’t have to move the children. The little one wakes up at about three in the morning, so I lie down properly as I rock him back to sleep. He’s up for good at dawn, but David changes him and takes him for a walk around the hotel grounds so I can sleep another hour.

I wake up when the big one rolls over on me and asks for cartoons. I put on the Disney Channel, check my phone, and see that Charlotte did throw up, that she can’t find her wedding ring or engagement ring, and that she wants me to come help her. And bring her a coffee from Starbucks.

***

“It was all night,” she says. “Like, every hour. I don’t know that I got that sick in college.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can smell it.”

“Still?”

“Yup.”

“Sorry.”

I am sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing jeans, a tank top, and flip flops. I feel like I’ve put my uniform back on.

“When I opened the mini-fridge this morning, I wretched again.”

“Probably your stomach is all messed up from last night,” I say.

“Think so?”

“Yeah.”

“I still can’t open it,” she says.

“You can barely drink your coffee,” I say.

“But I can smell it fine.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I hope David is packing up. I want to be back on the road pretty early. We promised the kids we’d stop at the In-N-Out on the way home, and I’d like it if the toddler didn’t fall asleep before we get there.

“Gabe hasn’t texted me back this morning.”

“He’s probably still asleep.”

“He always gets up with me on the weekends.”