He didn't know why he said it. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the fact that a Black single father like Raymond had spent so many years using humor as a shield that the habit had become involuntary, automatic as breathing, cheaper than therapy. Callie was bent over the wood plank, running his DeWalt like she'd been born holding one. Raymond was staring at the blueprints in his hands not reading a single line.
Then his mouth opened. "At this rate," he said, "you're never going to find a husband, Callie." She looked up and smiled, patient and unhurried. "Then maybe," she said, "you're the reason why." The drill kept running.
Raymond forgot how to breathe. Raymond Rowe owned exactly one coffee mug he liked and it had a chip on the rim the size of a thumbnail. He'd been meaning to replace it for 18 months. He never did. Not because he forgot, but because somewhere between the school drop-offs and the freelance deadlines and the nights spent sanding wood by lamplight replacing a chipped mug had started to feel like a luxury reserved for people whose lives had more margin than his.
He was 38 years old. He worked with his hands. He raised his daughter alone and he had learned slowly and without ceremony to stop wanting things that weren't immediately necessary. The house on Delford Street was part of that logic. He'd bought it because it was affordable and structurally sound and had a backyard big enough for Maya to run in not because it was beautiful.
It wasn't. The porch railing was uneven. The kitchen floor clicked in two places. And out back, half buried under a tarp that had seen three winters, sat a stack of cedar planks and a set of blueprints for a deck he'd drawn up two years ago and never built. He told himself he'd get to it.
He told himself a lot of things. Callie Brooks moved into a rental four houses down on a Thursday in early June, which Raymond only noticed because her moving truck blocked the alley he used to back his flatbed out. He wasn't annoyed, exactly. He just stood at the edge of his driveway with his coffee, chipped mug naturally, and watched a woman in work boots direct two movers with the quiet authority of someone used to being listened to. He didn't introduce himself that day.
She did it herself 3 days later when she knocked on his door holding a casserole dish covered in foil and wearing the expression of someone who'd rehearsed an opening line and decided at the last second to abandon it. "I'm Callie," she said. "I live down the block. I made too much zucchini bread and I don't know anyone yet, so" Raymond looked at the dish, then at her. "You want me to take your extra bread."