The drill kept running. Raymond stood there with the blueprint in his hands and felt the sentence rearrange something in his chest that he'd spent a long time keeping in one place. That night, after Maya was asleep, Raymond sat in the workshop with the lights low and the DeWalt on the bench in front of him. He wasn't working. He was just sitting with it, with the fact that a woman had looked at him and said something that precise and meant it, and that his first instinct had been to make a joke about it.
He wanted her. That was the stripped-down truth he'd been circling for weeks and it sat in the room with him now without apology. But wanting something in Raymond's experience was where things began to go wrong. Wanting meant reaching. Reaching meant exposure.
And exposure, especially for a man who'd already watched one version of his life disassemble itself quietly over 18 months, meant the possibility of Maya watching it happen. That was the part he couldn't get past, not his own pain. Maya's. He spent the following week trying to behave normally. He was not successful.
He found moments where he almost said something real one evening on the deck when it was just the two of them and the light was going golden and Callie made some offhand remark about how the cedar smelled different in the heat and Raymond had opened his mouth with genuine intention. But then Maya came running out from the back door announcing that the session was over and she'd drawn everything Callie had shown her. He watched Maya take Callie's hand and pull her toward the drawing on the patio table and Callie laughing as she let herself be pulled and the thought that moved through him wasn't warmth, it was vertigo. "If this goes wrong," he thought, "Maya loses her, too." He didn't say anything that evening.
His friend Marcus came by the following Saturday morning. They'd known each other since they were both 19 and broke and working the same construction site in South Providence and Marcus had the particular immunity to Raymond's deflections that only came from two decades of practice. They were sitting on the front steps with coffee when Marcus asked with no particular lead up how things were going with the woman down the street. Raymond said things were fine. He said they were working on the deck together.
He said it was a practical arrangement. Marcus let that settle for a moment then said, "You've cleaned your workshop. You're buying good coffee, and you smiled when you said her name just now, and I don't think you noticed." Raymond started to say something and Marcus cut him off. "You're doing the thing," Marcus said.
"Where you decide in advance that it's going to fall apart so you don't let it start. You did it after Diane, and you're doing it again. Maya's the reason this time instead of work, but it's the same move, Ray." Raymond looked at his cup. "She doesn't need a perfect situation," Marcus said.
"She needs her dad not to be lonely for the rest of his life." Raymond didn't have an answer to that. The problem with Marcus was that he wasn't wrong. He was almost never wrong, and it made him genuinely difficult to be around on certain mornings. That next Saturday, Callie texted asking if he still wanted to get the last section done before the weather changed.