And every one of them is the exact opposite of what I've been told love is supposed to sound like. I didn't say anything about love. No, she agreed. You didn't. And she picked her coffee back up and the moment stretched and neither of them knew what to do with it.
And mercifully, Lily thundered back into the room in her soccer jersey with her shinuards on the wrong legs. Daddy, we're going to be late. We're going to be so late. Coach says if you're late, you don't start. We're not going to be late.
Bug shine guards are backwards. Come here. And the enormous thing between the adults folded itself up and got put away because a child needed her. Shinuards fixed. And that was the rhythm of Nathan's life.
The way the profound and the mundane braided together the way you could be in the middle of the most important conversation of your life and still have to tie a small shoe. Victoria's coming to your game, Lily announced, apparently having decided this, "Right, you can come to my game. I'm a striker. That means I'm the one who scores. I scored last week two times. " Victoria opened her mouth to make an excuse, a graceful one.
She had a hundred of them meetings and calls and obligations, the machinery of a life built to have no gaps in it. And then she looked at the little girl's face, open and hopeful. And she looked at the drawings on the refrigerator and she thought about her calendar blessedly terrifyingly empty now that she'd blown up the only relationship in it and she heard herself say I would love to come to your game. Lily whooped. Nathan raised an eyebrow.
You don't have to, he said quietly under the child's celebration. She'll forget, she asked in 10 minutes. I know I don't have to. Victoria sat down her coffee. That's rather the point, isn't it?
I've spent my whole life doing things I have to do. She looked at him. Can I borrow something to wear? I can't very well show up to a children's soccer game in a cocktail dress. Or your shirt, though.
I'm growing fond of it. Nathan found her a pair of Lily's mother's old sweatpants that had been in a box in the closet for 5 years and a hooded sweatshirt of his own. And Victoria Harrington walked out of that apartment in borrowed clothes with her hair in a ponytail. And if the neighbors had known that the woman climbing into the mud splattered pickup was worth 11 billion, not one of them would have believed it. The soccer game was at a public park with chainlink fences and dented goals and a snack table run by two exhausted mothers.
Nathan set up a folding chair for Victoria on the sideline, and she sat in it in her borrowed sweats, and she watched a pack of seven-year-olds chase a ball in a swarm. And Lily, true to her word, was a striker, which mostly meant she stood near the goal and shrieked encouragement. "She's not actually very good," Nathan said, sitting down beside Victoria. "Don't tell her I said that. " She's magnificent, Victoria said, and she meant it watching Lily wave both arms over her head at nobody in particular. Look at her.