I just thought she should meet someone who hasn't forgotten. Marcus held that in his chest for a moment. He didn't know what to say, so he said the thing that was simply true. She seems like she's doing all right, he said. Henry smiled.
This time it reached his eyes. She is, he said. She's just forgotten it sometimes. He opened the door. The night was clear now.
The rain had washed everything clean and left the air with that sharp electric smell that followed Georgia storms. Marcus walked to his truck. Lily climbed in and buckled her seat belt with the self-sufficiency she'd been insisting on since age seven. "I like them," she announced as Marcus backed down the drive. "Yeah," he said, "specially the old one." She looked out the window at the lights of the house.
"He's sad about something, but he's nice." Marcus glanced at her. "What makes you say he's sad?" Lily kept looking out the window. "The same way you're sad sometimes," she said simply. "But you keep going anyway." Marcus drove. The road was quiet and the night was clear, and somewhere behind him, the lights of the Caldwell estate grew smaller in the rear view mirror.
He didn't know what any of it meant yet. He just knew that something had shifted the way you feel a change in the air before you see the clouds. Something had shifted and whatever it was, it had just begun. Three days passed before Marcus heard from the Caldwells again. Three ordinary days, a rotted subfloor on Clement Street, a busted water heater on the north side of town.
Lily's parent teacher conference on Wednesday evening where her teacher, a young woman named Miss Aaphor, told Marcus with barely concealed delight that Lily had corrected her spelling on the whiteboard in front of the whole class and then apologized so sincerely that nobody could stay annoyed about it. She's something, Miss Okafor said. Yeah, Marcus said she really is. He drove home thinking about nothing in particular, about the subfloor, about whether he had enough cedar planks for the Abernathy job, about whether Lily had eaten enough at dinner or just rearranged the vegetables on her plate strategically, which was a different thing entirely. He was not thinking about Emily Caldwell.
He told himself that on the drive home firmly twice. Then his phone rang. I didn't recognize the number. He almost let it go to voicemail. He was two blocks from the house and Lily was with the neighbor, but something made him pick up.
Some instinct he couldn't name. Marcus Williams, he said. There was a pause on the other end. Not the hesitation of someone who' dialed wrong. The pause of someone who'd rehearsed what they were going to say and was deciding in the last second whether to say it.
This is Emily Caldwell. Marcus said nothing for a moment. He pulled over to the curb without thinking about it. Mr. Williams, I want to apologize. She said, "I was not.