And he meant it. He meant it in a way he hadn't meant the same words in six months. Not performed okay, not functional, desperate, everything okay. Actually, grounded, oriented, purposeful, good. Talk to you tonight, Patricia said, and hung up.
He finished the pre-flight, flew the chacharter, landed clean, drove home. Callaway's press conference was playing on his phone when he walked in the door. Zoe wasn't home yet. Bus was 20 minutes out and he watched the relevant portion once. He watched Callaway stand behind a bank of microphones in a stay that cost more than Marcus monthly mortgage payment and say individual employees without management knowledge with the practiced confidence of had been performing certainty his entire adult life.
He watched it once. He turned it off. He started making dinner. When Zoe came home, she dropped her bag at the door and said, without having been asked. I heard some kids talking about your thing today.
My thing, Marcus said at the stove, the Callaway stuff. The airline. They were saying the airline CEO said you were lying. He turned around. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, backpack still on one shoulder, watching him with those old soul eyes.
What did you think about that? He said. She considered it seriously with the deliberate expression she got when she was actually thinking something through rather than just answering. I think she said finally that he said it on TV in a really expensive suit and you filed 43 things in writing. She tilted her head slightly.
And you always told me that talk is what people do when they don't have receipts. He stared at her. That's basically it. He said. "I know," she said and went to her room.
He turned back to the stove and made dinner and let the particular fullness of that moment settle in him. His daughter, 9 years old, who had been watching him her whole life and had apparently been taking notes on all of it. That night, after Zoe was asleep, he went to the porch. Diane's light was on. After a few minutes, she came out and sat on her own porch, and they talked across the small distance between the two houses, the way they sometimes did in the evenings, not face to face, just two people in the Georgia dark talking.
"He came after you today," she said. "He tried." Marcus said, "How do you feel about it?" He considered the question. "Honestly, I feel like a man who knows exactly what he has and exactly where it is. And I feel like he said something today that he's going to regret saying and he doesn't know that yet. She was quiet for a moment.
Is that confidence or is that something else? Both. He said it's confidence because I know the documentation is real. And it's something else because he paused searching for the word because I've been through worse than a CEO calling me a liar on television. I've been through the kind of alone where you're raising a child by yourself and doing a job right that nobody's recognizing and filing memos into a void for 2 years.
That's harder than this. He paused. This is just visible. She didn't say anything for a moment. Then Marcus, can I ask you something personal?