"You want some breakfast? " Marcus said. "I make a decent omelette," Robert blinked. "Then slowly," the ghost of something that might eventually become a real smile moved across his face. "I don't eat eggs," he said. "Then I'll make something else. " Marcus opened the door wider.
"Get in here. " Robert stepped inside. And the day that had started cold and gray started to feel somehow like it might turn out all right after all. Robert ate the toast. He said he didn't eat eggs and Marcus respected that. So he made toast with butter and a side of sliced apple and set it on the table without making a production out of it.
Robert sat down, picked up a piece of toast, and ate it like a man who hadn't let anyone feed him breakfast in a very long time, and wasn't quite sure what the protocol was for accepting it. They didn't talk much that morning. The girls came downstairs 20 minutes later, and Zoe immediately climbed onto the chair next to Robert and stared at him with a kind of direct, unblinking curiosity that only six-year-olds can pull off without it being rude. "Are you a soldier? " she said. Robert looked at her.
I was Did you shoot people? Zoe. Marcus said it firm, but Robert held up one hand. It's all right. He looked at Zoey calmly.
I did things in the war that were necessary. That's as much as anybody needs to know. Zoe considered this with great seriousness. My teacher says war is sad. Your teacher is right, Robert said.
Zoe nodded, satisfied, and reached for an apple slice. And just like that, it was over. The way conversations with six-year-olds always end completely. Without ceremony, replaced immediately by whatever comes next. Nadia, the older one, sat at the other end of the table and watched Robert with a different kind of attention.
Quiter more calculating. She had her father's eyes and her mother's patience, which made her at 9 years old already more emotionally intelligent than most adults Marcus knew. "Is he going to come over a lot now? " she asked Marcus later. When Robert had gone home, "Maybe," Marcus said. "Is that okay? " Nadia thought about it.
"He looks like he needs somewhere to go," she said. Marcus looked at his daughter for a moment. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I think he does. " The following Saturday came faster than Marcus expected. He told himself he wasn't nervous.
He was just helping a neighbor. This wasn't his family. Wasn't his business. Wasn't his situation to manage. He'd helped the man open a letter.
He'd helped him make a phone call. Now the daughter was coming and that was between them and Marcus would stay out of it. He told himself all of that. Then he found himself rearranging his living room at 9:00 in the morning for no reason. Cleaning a kitchen that was already clean and checking out his front window every 40 minutes.
At 11:30, he heard a car pull up in front of Robert's house. He didn't go to the window. He made himself not go to the window. He went to the window. A woman got out of a dark blue car.