Diane had always made them from scratch on Saturdays. And Marcus had taught himself her recipe from memory and a sticky note he found in her handwriting tucked inside a cookbook. He had memorized it within a month. He had kept making them every Saturday since. Even though the task always came with a quiet ache that settled into his shoulders while he stood at the stove, Jallen talked the entire meal.
About a video game he was playing with his friend Dre, about a substitute teacher at school who didn't know how to work the Smartboard and spent the whole class trying to figure it out while the kids gave fake instructions. About how he wanted to learn to skateboard but had already decided that helmets were for babies. Helmets, Marcus said, are for people who still have brains they want to use. That's not cool. Dad, cool people end up in emergency rooms.
Marcus Hayes, age 35, Jallen announced in a voice like a nature documentary narrator has never been cool and does not understand the culture. Marcus stared at his son across the table. Jallen smiled, his mother's smile, the exact same angle, the exact same mischief. And Marcus's chest did that thing it sometimes did where it just quietly broke and reassembled itself in the space of a single heartbeat. "Eat your pancakes," Marcus said.
"They're good, though," Jallen admitted. Mouth already full. "Really good, I know. " By 10:00, Jallen was at his friend Dre's house, three streets over. Under the supervision of Dre's mother, Linda, who had become one of Marcus' most reliable allies in the ongoing project of raising a child without losing his mind. Linda was one of the few people who looked at Marcus and didn't flinch or immediately pivot to asking him how he was holding up.
She just looked at him like a person, and that small thing meant more than she probably realized. Marcus drove home after dropping Jallen off and sat at Train Boy for 10 minutes without going inside. The house was quiet, completely absolutely quiet in a way that only happened when Jallen wasn't in it. He had learned over the years to manage the quiet. He had routines for it, yard work usually, or organizing the garage or taking on extra shifts when the hotel was short staffed, which it often was.
He was excellent at keeping himself occupied because he had understood early on with a clarity that came from the specific kind of desperation that grief creates that if he stopped moving the quiet would become something else entirely. But that morning sitting in his own driveway on a Saturday in late September with the California sky doing something genuinely beautiful above him and the salt air coming in off the water three blocks away. Marcus Hayes did something he had not done in a very long time. He made a decision entirely for himself. He went inside, put on his swim shorts, grabbed a towel, and went to the beach.
Not for Jallen, not for work, not because anyone needed him to, just because the ocean was there, and he was tired, and for reasons he could not fully articulate, he needed to sit beside something that was bigger than his problems and didn't care about any of them. The beach was moderately busy for a Saturday families with small children. A few joggers, a volleyball game in progress down toward the pier. Marcus found a spot away from the main clusters of people. Closer to the rocks at the northern end where the crowd thinned out and the sound of the water was cleaner, less interrupted by human noise.
He spread his towel. He sat down. He took his shoes off and pressed his feet into the sand and felt the warmth move up through his legs. He closed his eyes for the first time, and he didn't even want to calculate how long. He just sat there, not planning, not managing, not holding anything together.
The waves moved in and out with their ancient indifferent rhythm, and Marcus breathed with them. And for about 15 minutes, the hollow place behind his sternum was quiet. He didn't think about the hotel. He didn't think about next week's grocery list or Jaylen's dentist appointment or the slow leak under the kitchen sink he hadn't gotten around to fixing yet. He didn't think about Diane.
He just sat. He was so thoroughly not thinking about anything that when a towel landed in the sand roughly 3 ft to his left, he didn't immediately process it as anything meaningful. He glanced over. It was a beach bag. First, a nice one.