11 years, he said. Met her when we were both 23. She was working at the county library. I came in to use the internet because mine was out and she helped me find what I was looking for. And then we talked for 2 hours about nothing in particular.
And when I left, I drove around the block three times before I went back in to ask for her number. He said it like a man recounting coordinates on a map. Did she say yes the first time? Victoria asked. She said, "What took you so long? " He smiled at the stove.
"That was Dana. " Victoria put down the knife for a second. "She sounds like she was wonderful," she said. "She was," he said. Simple, unambiguous, no qualification. "She was the kind of person who made everywhere she went better.
Not because she tried to, just because that's who she was. " He turned from the stove and looked at her directly. "You ever know somebody like that? " he asked. "Somebody who just makes the room different when they're in it. " Victoria thought about it honestly. "My mother," she said. "She was like that.
She passed 3 years ago. " Marcus nodded slowly. "The way he nodded communicated something that a lot of people couldn't communicate with full sentences and acknowledgement without pity, a recognition without intrusion. " Then you know what it's like, he said, to have the room be different after. Yes, she said. I do. She picked up the knife and kept dicing, and neither of them said anything for a while.
And this time, the silence was of a different quality entirely. This one had weight and history, and two people sitting on opposite sides of a loss, close enough to recognize each others. She was still holding the knife when she heard the front door. It came open fast. The way children open doors, the full commitment of someone who has not yet learned to enter rooms with the filter and the sneakers hit the mat hard.
And then a voice, young and carrying and completely certain of its welcome. Dad. Emily said that the Jurassic period wasn't actually called the Jurassic period by the people who lived in it. But I said that was obvious because they didn't have words for geological time periods. And she said, "I was being annoying, but I was just being correct. " She came around the corner and stopped.
Ava Carter was 8 years old and small for it with her father's eyes and her mother's mouth and a pink backpack that was almost as big as she was. She looked at Victoria with the frank unfiltered assessment that children are capable of before they learn discretion. "Hi," Ava said. Hi, Victoria said. Who are you?
Ava. Marcus' voice came even from the stove. That's Victoria. She had car trouble this morning. I invited her to dinner.