An actual laugh. The kind that surprised him by coming from somewhere genuine, somewhere he hadn't visited in a while. Clare turned and looked at him when he laughed. And something in her expression shifted very slightly, something that looked almost like relief. "You should do that more," she said.
Do what? Laugh like that. Like it's real. He didn't know what to say to that. He looked back at the water.
Sorry, she said immediately. That was too much. I have a habit of never mind. No, he said don't apologize. It's thought about it.
I just don't do it that often. The real kind. Why not? Single dad. Not a lot of time for He stopped.
He didn't finish the sentence because the end of it was something like comedy or joy or remembering to be a person. And all of those endings sounded either pathetic or theatrical. Neither of which he wanted to be. But Clare seemed to hear it anyway. How old?
She asked. Nine. His name's Jallen. He's lucky. Marcus shook his head.
He's been through a lot. Kids who go through a lot and still have someone showing up for them every day are lucky. She said, "That's not an accident. That's someone making choices. " She looked at him directly. "You make those choices every day.
That counts for something. " The words landed somewhere in his chest and stood there. He didn't know how to respond to that. So he said nothing and the silence between them was the kind that felt unexpectedly like a place you could rest. They talked for two more hours. He didn't plan to.
He had not gone to the beach planning to have a conversation with anyone. He had gone to be alone to be silent to temporarily stop being responsible for anything. But the conversation kept happening. And the strange thing was that it didn't feel the kind of conversation he usually had. The functional abbreviated exchanges of a man whose social life had quietly collapsed into logistics.
It felt like the kind of conversation he used to have before when he was a younger man who still believed that talking to people might lead somewhere. She told him about growing up in Atlanta, the only daughter of a father who ran a small business and a mother who kept the books. She told him about going to college on a scholarship she had to fight for and arriving in a business school classroom, feeling like she had climbed through a window rather than walked through a door. Surrounded by people whose families had been building this kind of wealth for generations while hers had been building the kind of resilience that doesn't show up on a resume. He told her about growing up in South Central about his father who worked two jobs and still found time on Sundays to teach Marcus to fix things, engines, appliances, anything with moving parts.