She looked at Malcolm. She looked at Clare. She looked back at her homework. "Daddy's been weird all week," she announced to her math worksheet. "I have not been weird," Malcolm said.
You made eggs three times, Ava said. "I like eggs." You made them for dinner. You never make egg eggs for dinner. You say breakfast food for dinner is how civilization starts to unravel.
Clare pressed her lips together very firmly. Malcolm looked at his daughter. "You remember too much." "You told me to pay attention to things." Ava put her pennel down and looked at him with the directness that Malcolm found both deeply gratifying and regularly unnerving.
"Are you and Miss Clare in a fight?" "No," they said simultaneously. Ava looked between them for a moment with the analytical calm of someone running calculations. Then she picked up her pencil and went back to her worksheet. "Okay," she said.
Just that. Malcolm exchanged a look with Clare over Ava's head. Clare raised her eyebrows slightly. A look that said very clearly she knows. Malcolm shook his head.
A look that said equally clearly she's eight. Clare's eyebrow went higher. Malcolm looked away first. He always looked away first. That was new information he wasn't entirely comfortable with.
6 days into the agreement, Malcolm got the call from Diane. He had been expecting it since her text at Ava's soccer practice the previous weekend, the one he had read and then deliberately put out of his mind because there was a limit to how many things he could manage at once. And the text had come in at a moment when he was already at that limit. Diane's timing had always been slightly uncanny that way. She had an instinct for arriving precisely when Malcolm's hands were already full.
He took the call in his car, parked outside the hardware store where he'd gone on his lunch break to pick up parts for a boiler repair. "I need to talk to you about the custody schedule," Diane said without preamble. I figured. "Marcus got transferred. His company's moving him to Dallas."
Malcolm was quiet for a moment. Marcus was Diane's husband, the man she had married 14 months after their divorce was finalized, a logistics manager for a freight company who seemed decent enough and more importantly had always been good with Ava. "Okay," he said carefully. ""I need to know whether you'd be open to discussing a modification. If we move to Dallas, I'd want Ava with me during the school year." The inside of the car got very quiet.
She's in school here. Diane, she'd be in school there, too. Malcolm, it's Dallas, not the moon. She's in a good school. She has friends.