She looked at him for a moment in the way she had always looked at him with those deep brown eyes that had come from Diane and that saw things he sometimes wasn't ready to have seen. "You look tired," she said. "Good tired," he said. What's good tired? He thought about how to explain it to a seven-year-old in a way that was both accurate and not reductive.
"Good tired is when you've been doing something hard," he said. "And the hard thing is working." She considered this with the gravity of someone taking new information seriously. "Is the company fixed?" She asked.
He had told her months ago that he was trying to fix something at work. He had not told her the full complexity of what fixing meant, but she had been asking in her intermittent and practical way ever since. "It's getting better," he said. "How much better?" "Enough that I can see the difference," he said.
"Not so much that the work is done." "When will it be done?" He looked at her for a moment. "Some things don't have a done," he said. They have a direction and as long as you keep moving in the right direction, you're doing it right.
Maya absorbed this. That sounds hard, she said. It is, he agreed. But you like hard things, she said. Not as a compliment, just as a statement of observed fact.
The way she cataloged information about him, the way children catalog information about their parents, building a picture of who this person is from thousands of small, consistent observations. "I do," he said. She looked out the window. "Okay," she said. They drove in comfortable silence for a while.
Then Maya said without turning from the window. Mommy would have thought what you did was cool. Caleb kept his eyes on the road. The thing about Diane was that she had always arrived in the middle of the unexpected moments. Not the big occasions, but the Tuesday afternoons in the car, the ordinary minutes that turned out to be the ones that stayed with you.
Yeah. He said, "She always said you were the kind of person who did things the hard way because the easy way didn't mean anything." Maya said, "I didn't know what that meant when she said it. I think I'm starting to understand it now." He kept driving.