That was not the language of a homeless woman. That was not even the language of a woman going through hard times. That was the language of someone with a framework. Someone who thought in terms of understanding places rather than simply surviving them. He made a decision sitting there in that corner booth in the rain-washed quiet of Loretta's Diner at 11:00 at night.
He wasn't going to expose her. Not because he felt sorry for her. Not because he'd forgiven anything. Not because a hot meal and a few careful conversations had erased five years of what he carried. He wasn't going to expose her because something in his gut the same thing that had made him document everything when he worked at Brooks, the same thing that made him good at finding problems before they became catastrophes, told him that whatever this woman was doing, whatever she was looking for, it might matter.
And if it mattered, he might need to know where it went. He'd been shut out of every room where decisions about his life were made. Every room where the documentation disappeared. Every room where men in good suits decided his conduct was inconsistent with values they were stealing from in the dark. He'd never gotten to be in the room.
Maybe she was a room. Eve, he said. She looked up from her food. Same time next week, he said. She searched his face.
He kept it steady. Yeah, she said after a moment. Okay, he nodded once, picked up his fork again. Outside, the rain kept falling. Atlanta.
Steady and quiet. The kind that doesn't announce itself. The kind that just eventually soaks through everything. The third time she came, she asked him a question he wasn't ready for. They'd been sitting for about 20 minutes.
She'd eaten. He'd had coffee. They'd talked about Atlanta in the abstract, about the city changing, about which neighborhoods were changing fastest, about who was being pushed out and who was moving in. She was careful in how she framed her questions, but she was definitely asking questions. That night she set down her fork, folded her hands on the table, and looked at him directly for the first time.
Without the quick glances away, without the studied downward cast of the eyes she usually deployed. "Marcus," she said, "can I ask you something real?" He looked back at her. "Go ahead." "Do you know anyone who was turned down for affordable housing in this city?
In the last 5-6 years?" "Families who applied and were told no and couldn't understand why." The air between them changed. He felt it change. He was certain she didn't know why.
He kept his face exactly where it was. "Why do you ask?" "Because I'm trying to understand something," she said, "about how programs that are supposed to help people actually function on the ground, whether they work the way they're supposed to, whether the people who need them most actually get them." She was good. He had to give her that.