Something cracked open for just a fraction of a second, and behind it was something raw and undefended that the wool cap and the oversized jacket and the careful soft voice hadn't been able to cover. She covered it back up quickly, but he'd seen it. They didn't talk much after that. She finished eating. She thanked him again, and this time he let her, nodded once.
She got up, adjusted the collar of the green jacket, and walked out into the rain. Marcus sat there for another 5 minutes before he paid his check and left. He told himself he wasn't going to think about it. He thought about it the whole drive home. Deshawn was asleep when Marcus got home.
The babysitter, Mrs. Patterson from two doors down, a retired school secretary who'd been helping Marcus out since his wife, Renata, passed had left a note on the kitchen counter. He did his homework. He ate well. Good kid, Marcus.
You're doing right by him. Marcus stood in the kitchen and read the note twice. He folded it and put it in the drawer where he kept things he didn't want to lose. He checked on Deshawn, who was sprawled across his bed with one arm hanging off the edge and a library book open on the pillow beside him. Marcus picked up the book without looking at the title, set it on the nightstand, and pulled the blanket up over his son's shoulder.
Deshawn didn't wake up. He never woke up when Marcus did that. It was one of the things about his son that made Marcus feel, on the worst nights, like maybe the ground under his feet was still solid. He went back to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and stared at nothing for a while. Five years.
Five years since he'd been walked out of Brooks Urban Living's offices on Peachtree Street with a cardboard box and a security escort and an HR document in his hand that described him, in careful corporate language, as having been terminated for conduct inconsistent with the standards and values of the organization. Conduct inconsistent. He turned that phrase over in his mind the same way he'd been turning it over for 5 years, like a stone with something sharp under it that you keep almost reaching for. He'd been a program coordinator in the affordable housing division. Not a manager, not an executive, but he was good at his job, better than good, and he'd started noticing things in the approval records that didn't make sense.
Applications from black families in specific zip codes were being routed through a secondary review process that didn't exist in any official policy document he'd ever seen. Applications from other demographics didn't go through that process. The timing on rejections for certain applicants was irregular. The denial language was formulaic in a way that suggested it had been templated, not written case by case. He'd documented it carefully, methodically, the way he did everything.
He'd brought it to his supervisor, a man named Gerald Pruitt, who'd listened politely, said he'd look into it, and then spent the next 3 weeks looking very specifically into Marcus. Six weeks later, Marcus was gone. The documentation he'd gathered, gone, too. The copies he'd kept on his work computer had been wiped. He'd had personal copies, but they were on an external drive that had been, according to the HR exit interview, inadvertently collected with company property during the separation process.
Inadvertently, he'd hired a lawyer. The lawyer told him, with genuine sympathy but absolute honesty, that what he had left testimony, memory, a few printed emails that had survived because he'd taken them home wasn't enough. Not against a company with a legal team that billed $500 an hour. Not without the documentation. Not without other witnesses willing to go on record.
And everyone who knew what he knew was still employed and had mortgages and families and reasons to stay quiet. By the time the case collapsed, Renata had already been diagnosed. Stage 3 ovarian cancer. He'd been unemployed for 4 months, burning through savings, fighting a case he couldn't win. And his wife, his 31-year-old wife, who laughed at every joke he ever made, even when they weren't funny, had stage 3 ovarian cancer.