He had been a maintenance supervisor for 6 years. He had organized his entire life around the stability that job provided not because it was the only thing he was, but because it was the foundation everything else stood on. Jalen School District, the house on Magnolia Street, the ability to have a Tuesday morning where he could sit in his own kitchen and drink coffee with a neighbor without the background noise of financial catastrophe. If the foundation shifted, everything shifted. I'm concerned, Marcus said.
I'm not panicking. Good. Gerald stood and extended his hand. Don't panic. Don't escalate outside of this process and don't compress.
You know what I mean by that? Marcus thought of Clare saying the same word in her voice on the phone at 9:00 on a Thursday night. Yeah, he said. I know. He went to work.
He ran his department with the same precision and focus he brought every day because the professionalism was not a performance and he was not going to let someone else's bad decision become his bad behavior. He supervised two junior technicians and one apprentice who was two months into the job and still slightly terrified of the boiler system. He fixed a ventilation problem on the fourth floor that three people had filed maintenance requests about and two people had been told was not a priority. He ate lunch in the breakroom and said very little and went home at 5:15. That night he told Jallen none of it.
His son was too young for this particular weight and Marcus was too practiced at carrying it alone. He made dinner, helped Jallen finish a book report on a novel about a kid who ran away from home and came back changed and thought while he read over Jaylen's rough draft that most good stories were about that leaving the version of yourself that wasn't working anymore and finding your way to the one that could. Is it good? Jaylen asked watching his father's face. It's good.
Marcus said this part here. He pointed to a paragraph near the middle. You wrote that he came back because he missed his family, but earlier you wrote that he left because he felt invisible at home. Those two things are in tension with each other. Jaylen frowned at the page.
What does tension mean in writing? Means they push against each other. And when things push against each other, that's where the real story is. Marcus set the paper down. Why did he come back?
Do you think the real reason? Jaylen thought about it. Really thought the way he did when he wasn't performing thinking but actually doing it because being somewhere else didn't fix the invisible feeling. He said finally it just moved it. Marcus looked at his son for a moment.
Write that, he said. Exactly that. Jaylen grabbed his pencil. Marcus watched him write and thought about invisible feelings and the places you carry them to. And about a man who had spent four years making himself efficiently invisible so that no one would have to deal with the inconvenience of his grief and about whether being somewhere else somewhere larger somewhere that asked more of him might do what Jaylen's character had discovered running away couldn't he thought about Clare's event 9 days away he thought about the suit in his closet he called his brother that night Don lived in Oakland and had the kind relationship with Marcus that brothers develop when they've been through loss together.