Brilliant and enormous and entirely indifferent. She stood at the window for a minute. Then she opened the paper from Susan and found the cast iron pan in the back of the cabinet where she'd put it after buying it with good intentions three years ago and using it once. She made the waffles. She ate them standing at the counter.
She thought about a kitchen table with three chairs. She thought, "That's the table I want. " She wrote it down on actual paper in the notebook she used for her most important thinking, the one she'd bought at the beginning of the year with the intention of using it for strategic planning, which had instead remained 90% blank because she did all her strategic thinking in meetings and had started to understand that meetings were where honest thinking went to get managed into something presentable. She wrote, "That's the table I want. " She went to bed at 10:00. She slept. She called Marcus on Tuesday night.
She'd thought about calling Monday. She'd thought about it Sunday. She'd told herself she was giving it space. Giving him space. Giving whatever this was the chance to settle before she poked at it.
The truth was she was afraid that the phone would make it different. That 5 hours of highway would translate into distance of a different kind. The kind that had nothing to do with geography. He picked up on the third ring, just her name, just that. Hi, she said, and felt 17 years old saying it.
You make it back. Okay. Sunday afternoon. No car trouble. I'll note the improvement, he said.
And she could hear the almost smile in it. Sat on her couch with the Atlanta lights behind her and said, "How's Ava? Mad at Tyler again. Different offense. Same pattern.
The castle situation has escalated. He knocked over her dinosaur display during free choice time. Marcus said, "Apparently, she spent all of Tuesday lunch writing a formal complaint to submit to Mrs. Patterson used my stapler to put it together. " Victoria laughed. "Actually laughed, the real kind, and it echoed in the apartment in a way that highlighted how infrequently it had been used. " Did Miss Patterson respond to the formal complaint?
She wrote back a note that said Ava's concerns had been received and would be reviewed. Marcus said Ava has declared this a victory and stapled that to the original document. I love her. Victorious said it came out before she decided to say it. She heard it land in the air between them and thought about taking it back and then didn't because it was true and she decided to say what was true.
Marcus was quiet for a moment. She asks about you, he said. She wants to know if you learned what a cakewalk is. I did, Victoria said. I could now explain it to someone else.