I know. He fixed mine. He fixes everything, Ava said. Then can you braid hair? Victoria blinked.
I'm sorry. My friend Maya's sister can do the kind of braid that goes in three directions at once. I've been trying to learn it from a video, but it keeps falling out. Ava, Marcus said from the kitchen. Give the woman 5 minutes.
I'm just asking, Ava said deeply injured. I've never done a braid like that, Victoria said. But I'm a reasonably fast learner. Ava looked at her with new interest. Then she dropped her backpack by the couch with a crash that should have broken something inside it and went to the kitchen.
Dad, I'm hungry. Dinner's in 20. Chicken and rice. Do we have the sauce? We have the sauce.
Okay. She picked up a banana from the counter with the casual authority of someone who has negotiated this particular negotiation many times before. Can I watch one show? One short one? She disappeared around the corner.
20 seconds later, the television came on. Victoria stood in the kitchen with diced vegetables on the cutting board and something happening in her chest that she couldn't quite categorize. It was too warm for happiness and too quiet for joy. And it had been too long since she'd felt it to immediately put a name on it. Marcus came to take the vegetables.
"She's a lot," he said. "She's wonderful," Victoria said. He looked at her. Something in what she'd said, either the word or the way she meant it registered in his face. He looked back at the pan.
Yeah, he said quietly. She is. Dinner was rice with chicken thighs in a sauce that was built on something Marcus had learned from his grandmother in Savannah. He mentioned this without preamble. The way people mention things that are foundational.
And there were vegetables and a salad that Victoria made under instruction that she followed more carefully than she'd followed most things in recent memory. They sat at a table that was just right for three. Ava talked about her school day with the comprehensive authority of someone delivering a state of the union address, the injustice of the seating arrangement in math class, the political dynamics of who sat where at lunch, the ongoing unresolved matter of the classroom hamster being allowed out of its cage on on Wednesdays but not Thursdays, which Ava felt was arbitrary and inconsistent. Victoria found herself listening to all of it. Not nodding absently, not halfpresent the way she was in most social situations.
Actually listening, actually engaged in the unfolding narrative of an 8-year-old's week, which was, she thought, probably the most earnest story she'd heard in years. And then at recess, Ava said, leaning forward with emphasis. Tyler knocked over my castle. The one I'd been building for 3 days. What did you do?