Good, she said. What's for dinner? He laughed. He actually laughed and the laugh felt clean like something that had needed air. Getting it.
Whatever you want, he said. Tacos," she said immediately without hesitation and went to drop her backpack in her room. He was already pulling things from the refrigerator when his phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it. A text from Diane, "Three words, I saw it." He typed back and a pause, then her response, "You didn't waver once." He set the phone down and started cooking.
Outside the Georgia evening was settling into its late summer warmth. All that soft humid air and darkening sky. The same sky it had always been. The same sky Idame had pointed at when he was a little boy and said you were made for that. He was starting slowly, carefully with the measured precision of a man who had learned that the most important landings were the ones you made in the dark.
He was starting to believe her again. And then his phone rang one more time. Not Whitfield, not Marsh, not Patricia, a number he recognized immediately with a 912 area code. Savannah, Georgia, a number he had not seen in 3 years. His ex-wife, he looked at the phone for four full seconds.
Then he set it face down on the counter, turned back to the stove, and kept cooking. The phone rang four more times before it stopped. Marcus stood at the stove and listened to it ring and did not move. The taco meat was browning in the pan and Zoe was in the back of the house doing a whatever 9-year-olds do in the 45 minutes between school and dinner. And the Georgia evening was doing its thing outside the window.
And his ex-wife's number sat face down on the counter like a thing that had been diffused but not yet removed. Her name was Vanessa. Vanessa Reed, she'd kept the name after the divorce, which had always struck Marcus as a particular kind of irony, the kind that didn't have a punchline. They had been married for 4 years. Zoe had been born in year two.
Vanessa had left in year four. Sighting, and this was the word she'd used, the word he'd turned over in his mind for a long time afterward. Ambition, specifically the lack of it. She'd wanted more, more money, more status, more of the kind of life that gets posted on social media with a certain quality of light. Marcus had been building something real, something solid, something that would actually last.
And she'd looked at that and called it small. She hadn't taken Zoey. That was the thing Marcus never said out loud, but felt every single day. She had left them both. He stirred the pan, turned the heat down.
Listen to the silence where the ringing had been. Then his phone lit up again. Not a call this time. A text. He looked at it without picking it up.
It said, "I saw the press conference. We need to talk. It's important. Please call me." He read it twice. Then he set the phone back down, finished making the tacos, and called Zoe for dinner.