But I've seen your face when you come home from the Caldwell house, from the meetings, from when you and Emily talk. She looked at him steadily. You look different. You look like you did before mom got sick. Marcus's chest did something complicated.
I look happy, he said quietly. Yeah, she said. Like that. She picked her spoon back up. Take the job, Daddy.
He breathed. Just like that, he said. Just like that, she said. We don't have to be small forever just because things got hard for a while. He stared at his 9-year-old daughter.
"Who taught you that?" he said. She shrugged, eating her ice cream. "You," she said. "Mostly." and Emily a little bit. She paused.
And the book I'm reading about Eleanor Roosevelt, who had an extremely difficult life and refused to act like it. Marcus pressed his fingers to his eyes briefly. "Finish your ice cream," he said. He called Emily from the parking lot. "I'll take it," he said.
She was quiet for exactly one second, "Then good." on two conditions. Okay. I keep my business going in some form. I'm not disappearing from Cedar Falls. The people here I've made commitments to don't lose that.
Agreed. She said without hesitation. What's the second? The program gets built the right way. Bottom up, not top down.
I'm not putting the Caldwell Group's name on something and calling it community service. It has to be real work. My father's exact words to the board were that it has to be built by someone who's already been doing it, not someone who's learned about it in a boardroom, Emily said. That's why he wants you. Marcus leaned against his truck in the parking lot of the ice cream place on Route 7.
All right, he said. All right, she said. A pause. Marcus, she said, you know, this doesn't change anything between us, right? What you decide professionally has nothing to do with what she stopped.