She has her team. He stopped. He was already doing it. The thing where he cataloged everything he could lose before we had properly processed that he was being asked to potentially lose it. "When is this happening?"
"End of the calendar year, potentially. Marcus is still negotiating the timeline. A pause. "I'm not trying to take her away from you." I'm asking if we can have a conversation.
"We are having a conversation." "A real one. Not on the phone." He looked through the windshield at the parking lot. "I'll talk to my lawyer first."
A longer pause from Diane. "Of course you will." Her voice shifted, not angry. Exactly. But with the particular flatness that meant she had moved from hoping for cooperation to expecting the usual pattern.
"I'll wait to hear from her." She hung up. Malcolm sat in the parked car for 11 minutes not moving. He had gotten very good at calculating exactly how much time he could spend not moving before something else broke that required his attention. 11 minutes was usually what the situation allowed him.
Then he drove back to the community. He did not tell Clare about the phone call that evening. He also did not tell Clare the following day, which was the first real intentional time they had carved out together as part of the agreement. A Thursday evening, Ava at his mother's, the two of them meeting for dinner at a sit-down restaurant. Not the diner, not the community center, an actual tablecloth establishment on the west side where they had to make a reservation and everything thing.
It felt to Malcolm aggressively like a date. He arrived first. He sat down. He adjusted his water glass twice and then stopped because he was aware he was adjusting his water glass and it was making him feel like a man who had never eaten at a table before. Clare walked in 7 minutes later and sat down across from him and said, ""You adjusted everything on the table, didn't you?"" "The napkin was crooked."
"They fold napkins to be aesthetic, not to be used. That's a deeply wasteful philosophy." She smiled. And just like that, some of the tension broke. They ordered.
They talked about work, a new federal housing grant that Cornerstone had applied for, a family services expansion. Clare was developing a boiler in one of the organization's residential buildings that Malcolm was in a running battle with when they talked about Ava's team's upcoming game. They talked about Cla's mother's old house in Savannah, which her family was finally getting around to selling after 2 years of delay. And about 40 minutes in, when the plates had been cleared and they were sitting with the comfortable weight of a real meal between them, Clare looked at him and said, ""What are you not telling me?"" He looked up. ""Nothing, Malcolm."" "Clare, you've done that thing twice tonight where you start to say something and then you don't. She folded her hands on the table.
You're holding something. He was quiet for a moment. Then he told her about Diane's call. He told her the details, the transfer, Dallas, the school year, the word modification. He kept his voice flat.