It was too late to be a lunch, too early to be a dinner, this disappointing collection of food Greg was packing. He was leaving in the odd smear of time between the markers of his day. Not in the morning, not in the night. Not even in the midday. After lunch, before dinner. The sun was out but getting lazy. Everything starting to give over, accepting that this day's moment was swiftly passing. Maybe that was why he finally left. He had to get away from the giving over, for once. His son had been missing three weeks. He was packing a meal using what he had in the fridge. A buttered heel of bread, a rhombus of stiff cheese, a puckered tangerine, its skin loose around the wedges inside it. When had he last bought tangerines? It had been months. Maybe a year. Sometimes what he thought was a long time passing ended up being only a few weeks. Hey, when was that, last summer? Last Christmas? And his wife answering, Honey, that was only just last month. So who could know when anything actually happened? When he was a child he often had to mark time for himself. Today is Tuesday, that I know for sure. He was already looking forward to ignoring the lunch, stopping somewhere along the way, having a conversation with a waitress. I'm looking for my son. What came next? Shock? Admiration? He liked anticipating these kinds of things. The house was implacable. Quiet and unaffected. When he left, for all the time he'd be gone, the items in the house would stay in the same place. The house was not asking him for anything; the house wasn't begging him to stay. Instead it was watching him go. "Couch," he whispered. "Ottoman." Marking time, marking stasis. Then he said his own name: "Greg." He could just as easily have said the other names he was known by: Honey. Gregory. Dad. But at the end of the day, he thought of himself as only Greg. The buttery yellow light coming in through the plate-glass windows, at least, offered its confetti of dust. A stingy fanfare. His wife dusted often, almost daily, but sometimes you can't win for losing.