Ava got chocolate on her shirt, which she observed with scientific detachment, and then ignored. "Daddy," she said between spoonfuls. "Yeah?" "Were you scared today?" He looked at her in the rearview mirror.
"Yes." She nodded slowly. "But you did it anyway. Grandma says that's what brave is. Scared but doing it anyway."
He looked at the road. "Your grandma's right," he said. Ava ate more ice cream. "Are you still scared?" "A little.
About different things now." "What things?" He thought about it. He thought about Clare's apartment Sunday night and the crack in the wall and what he had promised to tell her honestly after the hearing. "Wanting something and not being sure if you deserve it," he said finally.
Ava was quiet for a moment. He could hear her thinking. "That's silly," she said, ""You deserve things. You work really hard." That's not exactly working hard doesn't automatically mean you deserve specific things, baby.
It's more complicated than that. "Is it about Miss Clare?"" He looked in the rearview mirror again. 8 years old. He was going to have to get significantly better at this. "Maybe," he said.
Ava finished her ice cream. "She likes you, Daddy. It's pretty obvious." "Yeah. She looks at you like you're the main part of the room," Ava said it with complete simplicity.
The way children state observations that adults spend years trying to articulate. "Like, wherever you are, that's the direction things are." Malcolm kept his eyes on the road. He was quiet for the rest of the drive, not because he had nothing to say, but because his daughter had just handed him the clearest possible description of something he had been watching and not fully naming for 4 weeks, and he needed a moment to sit inside it. He dropped Ava at his mother's for the evening his mother had already offered, already anticipated, because she was a woman who understood her son's life better than he gave her credit for.
He drove to Clare's. She had made shrimp and grits, which was his favorite thing she made and which she made. He now realized specifically when she wanted him to feel taken care of without making a production of the fact that she was taking care of him. They ate. They talked about the hearing the details.